The Life of Words

I have two upcoming notes in the journal Notes & Queries concerning T. S. Eliot and the Oxford English Dictionary. Though they won’t be published until later next year, the self-archiving policy at Oxford Journals allows me to make an unrevised pre-print version available here. The two articles are: “The ‘Oxford Dictionary’ in T. S. Eliot” and “T. S. Eliot in The Oxford English Dictionary” [click the titles to download the self-archived .pdf pre-print].

Please note that these are provided for archival, informational and/or commenting purposes only. Any citation should refer to the version of record in N&Q, which will differ in important ways. Please contact me for details about this.

I should note here happily that these two pieces started their lives as posts to this blog–respectively “Did TSE use OED, SOED, or COD“, and “Eliotic OED“. I’m not sure if I would have thought to write them for a scholarly audience if I hadn’t had this space to work out the rough ideas. And I certainly wouldn’t have had the benefit of John Cowan’s comment to “Did TSE…”, which made it into the eventual piece.

But then, in a real way Notes & Queries has been–for 165 years!–the archetypal academic blogging platform, featuring short observations and conjectures [=posts?] as well as correspondence among like-minded people sharing questions and the facts that answer them [=comments?]. So I’m pleased for lots of reasons to have these published there. Comments welcome.