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Every day I go out my back door, down the walkway to my studio.

It is still winter around these parts, even though severe cold appears to be behind us.  In Colorado we KNOW that we could still get 3 feet of snow! .. all the way into April.

Still, in my mind I have been planting flowers now. This flower bed that looks so bare, will be full of plants in around 12 weeks!  The grass will be green even before that!  I am so excited!  I love Spring!  I love when the birds get back from their vacation down south!  The woodpecker is already pounding on our chimney and I just smile!  Its all signs of Spring!   Soon I will be working in my studio with my door and windows open.  I am READY!!!

One of the best things about working at Oxford is all the brilliant coworkers I have. A while ago I found out that our copywriter, John Brehm is also a wonderful poet. Naturally, I harassed him until he agreed to share a poem with you! Today we are honored to publish “Prophecies: Right Here, Right Now.” John Brehm is also the author of Sea of Faith, which won the 2004 Brittingham Prize from the University of Wisconsin Press. Recent poems have appeared in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Boulevard, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. John is a freelance copywriter who works part-time for OUP. (more…)

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When people consult a dictionary, they expect to find entries defining individual words, compounds made up of two or more words, and common multi-word phrases. But what about when a frequently occurring phrase or compound is used as a blueprint for generating new concoctions, with some parts kept constant and other parts swapped out? Last week I discussed some simple two-word “templates” that allow for creative choices in filling one slot, such as ___ chic, inner ___, and ___ rage. In such cases, lexicographers can make a note of a particularly productive usage in the entry for the word that is kept constant (like chic, inner, or rage). Things get a little more complicated when we consider longer phrases that follow a similar pattern of substitution. Traditional dictionary entries aren’t always well-equipped to describe this type of “phrase-hacking.” But one thing becomes quite obvious when looking at a large corpus of online texts (whether it’s the Oxford English Corpus or the rough-and-ready corpus of webpages indexed by Google or another search engine): writers are fiddling with phrasal templates all the time, revivifying expressions that may have become too formulaic or hackneyed. Of course, there’s always a lurking danger that the constant modification of a cliché may itself ultimately become a cliché!
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Erin McKean, who is OUP’s chief consulting editor for American dictionaries when she’s not busy being “America’s lexicographical sweetheart,” filled in this past Sunday for a vacationing William Safire, devoting the New York Times Magazine’s “On Language” column to a subject that should be familiar to readers of this column: the Oxford English Corpus and the fascinating things that it tells us about our changing language. (more…)

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