Introduction main part

Сonclusion
Some items are probably missing from the OED because they are too new,
even for Robert Burchfield's Supplement, or the lightly expanded content of
the merged "second edition." An instance is Eurotunnel. Others are perhaps
too rare to have been picked up by the OED edilors or, if collected, too infrequent in use to have passed editorial scrutiny of what to include. Examples
may be esquire bedell and Eve's pudding.
The OED also avoids proper names, although in fact a good many get included. Indeed, the grounds on which the OED has admitted or excluded
proper names are not clear. Examination Schools as the name of a building at
Oxford where examinations are held is, in fact, defined inthe OED, but has no
citation or date, and seems to have been entered as an after-thought. Exonian is
defined as a native or resident of the town of Exeter, but not as a student or
alumnus of Exeter College.
Some items may have been excluded because they were judged too dialectal. Easter-ledge pudding is, according to the unappetizing definition in the
Collins Dictionary, a pudding made from the leaves of the bistort plant. The
term is not attested in the OED, but then it is a Northern delicacy and so is its
name. Northern things have been given short shrift in Southern England ever
since Chaucer's "Miller's Tale."
On the other hand, the OED does have an entry for emmet in the sense of a
tourist in Cornwall . Emmet's primary meaning is 'ant'. Tourists in Cornwall
American and British words 151
are so called because at certain seasons of the year they swarm like ants. The
term would seem to be just as regionally limited as Easter-ledge pudding, and
to be a joke word in addition. Perhaps it is mere happenstance that emmet
'tourist'is included inthe OED whereas Easter-ledge pudding is not.
Some items are probably missing because they were judged not to be lexical
matters on principle. An instance is the phrase eggs and bacon for what in
American use would be bacon and eggs. In this case one of the OED citations
contains some misinformation. The dictionary's entry for the tetm co-text includes the following citation commenting on the collocation of the words eggs
and bacon:
1965 B. M. H. Strang Metaphors & Models 4 Bacon and eggs is reversible, asfish ,nd
chips is not, ... by reason of linguistic information about position and about the items in
the co-text (the words bacon, eggs, fish, chips).
Barbara Strang's observation about the reversible order of bacon and eggs
appears to be supported by Ihe OED evidence, for the body of the dictionary
includes 14 instances of bacon and egg(s) (12 with the plural eggs and 2 with
the singular egg) and L3 instances of egg(s) and bacon (10 with the plural eggs
and 3 with the singular egg). According to the dictionary's evidence, the two
orders are practically equal in frequency, and thus the words are reversible in
the expression.
However, the text of the OED is overwhelmingly British. I have asked a fair
sampling of Americans which order they think is more natural, and their response is overwhelmingly, indeed so far universally, in favor of bacon and
eggs.The word order eggs and bacon is not impossible, but it is not normal for
Americans. The phrase as a term for a typical breakfast menu is not fully
reversible inAmerican use. Such a difference between British andAmerican in
the preferred ordering of the parts of a set expression needs to be recorded in
dictionaries as lexical information.
Only a few terms have been discussed here; others are listed in the appendix. They are limited to Briticisms beginning with the letter e in the semantic
areas of education, food, and transportation. But they are fairly representative
of the much larger range of British-American word differences. From even this
brief discussion, two conclusions should be apparent. One is that British and
American words differ extensively. The other is that dictionaries, including or
even especially that Queen of dictionaries, the OED, do a poor job of recording such differences.
In particular, the distinctive lexical features of British English have been
unconscionably neglected. An attempt to redress that neglect will be made by
the dictionary of Briticisms for which my wife and I have been gathering
additional evidence for the past few years whileAllen Walker Read's extensive
file of citations has been computerized. Like all works of human hands, it will
1,52 John Algeo
be incomplete and flawed, but it will make an effort to do on a large scale what
so far has been done mainly by enthusiasts on relatively small scales: to identify the range of distinctive words in British English.