Tag Archives: Emily Dickinson

“Chicken scratch”, coined by Shakespeare in 1909?

In “Emily Dickinson was a Dinosaur” I conjectured that T. W. Higginson might have been riffing on the idiom chicken-scratch when he described Emily Dickinson’s handwriting as resembling the “famous fossil bird-tracks” of Amherst. Now I’m not so sure. Higginson published his essay in 1891. But chicken scratch  and variants aren’t in OED2 or OED3, nor  […]

27.07.2013 – 10:33 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Etymology, Linguistics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (2)

Emily Dickinson was a Dinosaur

In a graduate student’s paper this morning I came across a description of Emily Dickinson’s handwriting by T. W. Higginson, who in 1891 remembered receiving a letter, almost thirty years earlier, postmarked Amherst, MA. The letter was the now famous one that begins “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?” […]

25.06.2013 – 16:33 | By D-AW | Posted in General, Poetry, Society, Politics, Ethics, Uncategorized | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Poetic Antagonyms

The verb “cleave” has two contradictory senses in English: it means both “to separate” and “to join together” (and so figures its own self-separated, self-joined meanings). Out this week is a journal article in which I discuss “cleave” and other self-antithetical words (I call them “antagonyms”) when they occur in English poetry, as well as […]

13.05.2013 – 14:07 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Poetry, Readings | Tagged , , , , | Comments (10)

Noah Webster was a terrible phonologist

I’ve been in the NYPL last week looking at Noah Webster’s papers. One of his handwritten lectures reminded me of what a bad phonologist he was. Objecting to John Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1791), Webster singled out the grouping of p, l, t, s, k, and th (as in ‘think’) together under the epithet ‘sharp’, […]

07.05.2012 – 21:30 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Linguistics, Poetry | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)