The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary have begun to post lessons learnt from their first-of-its-kind call for entries of 2001, when it asked science fiction fans to submit sfnal words that were missing from the Dictionary.
Soon we were being deluged with dozens of e-mails a day, containing suggestions, citations, and questions about our work. Mail came from all over the world, and correspondents included several noted SF writers. It took months to fully catch up with the backlog (and the pace has reached more manageable levels). But the results have been spectacular. Some of the entries we have published from the project include Martian, meteor storm, mind-meld (from 'Star Trek'), moon base, and multiverse, and out-of-sequence entries bot (a robot), filk (a type of song performed by SF fans), and Sturgeon's Law ('90% of everything is crap', formulated by writer Theodore Sturgeon)…
Science fiction has several advantages as a subject for this kind of investigation. The vocabulary is largely self-contained; SF terms tend to occur in SF and nowhere else, while, say, political language can be found anywhere and everywhere. The fans are particularly committed, often have linguistic interests, and are computer literate. They may also be more likely to be able to volunteer time than specialists in more academically oriented fields.
(Thanks, Diane!)
