LAS LENGUAS INGLESA Y ESPAÑOLA de Delfín Carbonell

Dr. Pedro Álvarez de Miranda (Royal Spanish Academy, RAE) has been kind enough to forward a very interesting article of his, "Dos efemérides", published recently in El Cultural (18 June 2026). He discusses the magnificent Diccionario de autoridades (1726–1739), which predates Dr. Samuel Johnson's dictionary by sixteen years. The article is well worth reading, both for its intrinsic interest and for the light it sheds on the importance of the Diccionario de autoridades in the history of European lexicography. In his Chasing the Sun: Dictionary Makers and the Dictionaries They Made (1996), Jonathon Green made little mention of these early Spanish contributions, including the Diccionario de autoridades , which marked a cusp in the history of dictionary making. Dr. Álvarez de Miranda writes with considerable scholarly authority and gravitas, and succeeds in whetting the reader's appetite for language and its history. 

  El 15 de abril de 1755 se publicó el Dictionary of the English Language , de Samuel Johnson , et al. , con unas 45.000 palabras, que ofrecía citaciones ilustrativas tomadas de la literatura. La obra marcó un hito en la lexicografía en lengua inglesa y se considera un monumento lexicográfico de primerísima magnitud. Quiero recordar que el llamado Diccionario de autoridades de la Real Academia Española , que aporta citaciones, comenzó en 1726 y se culminó en 1739, mucho antes de que el Dr. Johnson emprendiera la compilación de su obra. Tuvo ayudantes y secretarios (de ahí lo de et al. que he puesto arriba), pero es una obra de autor, donde abundan las definiciones chuscas, propias de un intelecto rebelde. Déjenme que transcriba algunos ejemplos, que sin duda les harán sonreír: Womanize : "to emasculate; to effeminate;  to soften. Urinal : "a bottle in which water is kept for inspection." Slut : "a word of slight contempt to a woman." Anecdote : "somethin...

  I have been scoffing New Year's resolutions for years, but I have returned to the fold in 2025. I want to try old systems anew to see the results, if any. Little to lose trying to improve ourselves and become more efficient, right? So, I have prepared a few resolutions that, if implemented, will gratify my day-to-day living. Here they are, for you to see and me to perform: 1. Finish compiling A Phraseological Dictionary, English-Spanish . I have been working on it for 4 years, and 2025 should put an end to it. Actively seek a publisher. 2. Write Literatura en Lengua Inglesa, II and III .  3. Improve my phonetic abilities by reading aloud in English and Spanish daily.  4. Daily penmanship or calligraphy as a meditation practice. 5.  Daily bicycle and strength training. 6. Take up again German and French. Nothing to write home about, really, and not a list difficult to accomplish. I am giving myself the benefit of the doubt. Happy New Year. Happy 2025!   3....

I asked Camilo José Cela for a brief prologue to my 1997 An English and Spanish Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional Language . He wrote it and asked me to his place in Puerta de Hierro several times. I showed him a few pages of my project on a Spanish Dictionary of Slang. Cela liked it but suggested I use backup citations for every entry. Foolhardily I dived into the project not realizing the amount of work it was to take. After two years and reading over 800 books, I had the manuscript ready. Víctor García de la Concha , then Director of the Real Academia Española , refused to allow me to use the CREA or CORDE, data bases that were almost ready for public use. I went to the Academia's library every day, from 10 to 1, for a month, to check the citation files. In 2000 Larousse published Gran Diccionario del argot, el sohez . McGraw-Hill brought out the US edition and Ediciones del Serbal also published two additional editions.  Cela suggested I use the word soez for the dicti...

  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.    

More often than not, I grab my soapbox, head towards the Retiro Park in Madrid, and shout to the four winds, to all and sundry to beware of Bilingual Dictionaries. Two-language lexicography is scorned and abused every time a new dictionary is published. The Collins dictionaries are supposed to be the best on the market. Not really. For instance, under "push" we will find the idiomatic expression "when push comes to shove" and the parallel Spanish idiom is given as "a la hora de la verdad".  If we look up "verdad" we will not find "a la hora de la verdad." That means that a Spanish-speaking student would never get to "when push comes to shove". Why? The answer is simple: bilingual dictionaries are not such, they are monolingual dictionaries: English-Spanish. and Spanish-English which are not synchronized but simply put together as one book. Two independent teams compose two independent workbooks which are sold, together, as one...

The English version of the title may have thrown you astray to think that this post deals with the meaning of what we all call "life." The Spanish version, however, sets things right because there is no definite article. I mean to inquire into the meaning of the word "life" when we say that "life is difficult," for instance. Bilinguals have the upper hand over monolinguals in many ways, but also in parallel lexicography. We are able to compare definitions and see the extent to which they differ from language to language.  "Facultad para crecer, renovar la propia sustancia, reproducirse, etc. que tienen los animales y las plants." Dicc. de María Moliner. "The sum of the distinguishing phenomena of organisms, esp. metabolism, growth, reproduction, and adaptation to environment." So says The Random House Dictionary .  When we seek the meaning of a word in one language, we can search for its meaning in the other language, thus getting a bet...

  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.” ...

For those interested in Lexicography -wordsmiths- I would like to suggest great readings on the subject: --K.M. Elisabeth Murray: "Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary," 1977. --Simon Winchester: "The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary," 2003. --Simon Winchester: "The Professor and the Madman," 1998. --John Willinsky: "The Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED," 1994. --Henry Hitchings: "Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson´s Dictionary," 2005. --Sydney Landau: "Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography," 2001.

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...