LAS LENGUAS INGLESA Y ESPAÑOLA de Delfín Carbonell

  Just as a shoplifter is "a person who steals goods from the shelves or displays of a retail store while posing as a customer", a word-lifter is a plagiarist who steals words, definitions, or examples from dictionaries while posing as a lexicographer. In my work, I must consult and check different dictionaries and I have often encountered this activity of pilfering others' work. Yesterday, while checking my Random House dictionary, I found an example for "do it up brown": "When they entertain, they really do it up brown." And, lo and behold, Collins online dictionary has the same example: "When they entertain, they really do it up brown." Coincidence? Intertextuality? Pilfering? Wordlifting? Plagiarism? God only knows who, by the way, has a special section in hell reserved for word-lifters of every kind.    

The dictionary I am working on, a bilingual phraseological dictionary, of English and Spanish, which thus far has over 685,000 words and 27,000 idioms, will be a workbook where equivalents will be found and a teaching book. A teaching dictionary is one where the user can learn so as to broaden his knowledge of phraseology in both languages. The more phraseology you have, the better you will be able to understand native speakers and each language's literature. I have been working on it for the past 4 years at a daily pace of 3-4 hours, 7/7 No less. I am expanding and improving and completing the one I published in 1994.      

  Years ago and in Telemadrid, Fernando Sánchez-Dragó , the Spanish journalist, novelist, tv personality, and thinker had an evening news program that tried, successfully, to be culturally a notch above competitors. One evening, he interviewed the then popular sociologist Amando de Miguel and, as it was his custom, Fernando presented his guest with a book. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was my  Diccionario del argot, el Sohez . Amando de Miguel said: "Let me see if this word is in here" and proceeded to flip pages in search of "the word". My blood froze in my veins. I knew that if the word was not included, the dictionary would lose all its credibility in front of thousands of viewers. Luckily the word was in the dictionary and I sighed with relief. But I never forgave Amando de Miguel for that. I suspected that he was hoping the word, whatever it was, was missing from my pages. However large a dictionary is, if the word you are looking up is not included...

Putting a bilingual dictionary together is a fool´s errand, especially in a team of one (an oxymoron). I have been working on my Bilingual Phrasebook for well over three years, at a pace of 4 to 5 hours a day. My fear is that some expressions, and idioms, may be left out. Yesterday I asked Laura Carbonell , an expert teacher of both languages and the author of the Spanish Grammar Cheat-Sheet , to randomly think of an idiom in Spanish. She put forward "saltar al ruedo". It was not in the dictionary! Hard to believe, but it shows that lexicography is more of an art than a science. Of course, I am not done yet, and I still have a lot of revising and editing to do.  RUEDO Echarse (lanzarse, tirarse, saltar) al ruedo (a la palestra) Jump (step, move, leap, rush) into the fray David ha saltado al ruedo de la política activa David has jumped into the fray of active politics — “Felipe González ha saltado al ruedo con gran aparato eléctrico porque sabe que va perdiendo.” ...

A pesar de que el castellano tiene una larga tradición lexicográfica y una de las más adelantadas de Europa, los diccionarios no se han considerado importantes en el correcto manejo del idioma. El español medio rara vez consulta el significado de vocablos y prefiere ignorar, o preguntar, antes de abrir un diccionario. Por contra, en los EE.UU, esta práctica es común, y los lexicones tienen gran prestigio. Dice Sidney I. Landau en su Dictionaries, the Art and Craft of Lexicography: "... in the U.S. the publishing industry has succeeded in convincing every family that their continuining literacy depends crucially on owning a dictionary."  Pero eso lo escribió en 1984. Ha llovido mucho desde entonces y los diccionarios, su consulta, y el arte de componerlos, han sufrido cambios radicales. Nuestros conocimientos del idioma tienen por origen el "boca a boca" (que dicen los "expertos") y esa fuente de información no es ni científica ni rigurosa. Empleamos u...

I am updating my A Phraseological Dictionary, English and Spanish . I put it together between 1991-94 and it was published by Ediciones del Serbal in 1995, 25 years ago. It has been, and still is, one of my best productions, mainly because bilingual dictionaries often err in idiomatic turns of phrase, the most complicated part of parallel language comparisons. This Sunday morning, and while I was working on it, I was musing about the difference in procedure that has come about in 25 years. I did have a computer, an IBM PS1, with a one-giga RAM, which cost me almost an arm and a leg. Now I am using a HP Envy with 16 gigas of RAM. Internet then was a toddler and I had to rely on mountains of dictionaries to check and compare. Piles of them, which I had to buy. I also had to run to the National Library to check books I could not afford. I soon discovered that I had to have a separate file for each letter in each language, which meant I had to close file A, and open file M, to che...