By Ted Shen
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Many subscribed. By the 80s, says McKean, the number had risen from the initial 80 to more than 20,000–enough for Urdang to pay his writers and place expensive ads in the New Yorker. The newsletter format was expanded to accommodate lengthy reviews of new dictionaries as well as erudite articles with titles like “Antipodean English.” The journal ran articles by jail inmates on prison slang, and “businessmen who had traveled to and resided in foreign countries, knew the language, and offered insights on Russian, French, and Chinese, and other tongues,” says Urdang, a self-billed “escapee from the graves of academe.” “As an editor, my biggest problem was trying to impart to a contributor who might be a prominent linguist that his writing was not good enough to be published in Verbatim, an exercise in tact and discretion, as you might well imagine.”
McKean, who’s only a few years older than the journal, traces her own obsession with language to a fateful day in her eighth year. “I was and still am a voracious reader,” she recalls. “So I even read the Wall Street Journal my dad brought home every day.” A human-interest story on the front page caught her eye. “It was an account of the completion of the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, along with a profile of its editor, Robert Burchfield,” she says. “I knew right away that I wanted to become a lexicographer. Here was a real, interesting job, not like ballet or astronautics that one could only dream about.”
Verbatim resumed publication in the fall of ’98 after a one-year hiatus. With the help of a volunteer copy editor and publishing software, McKean has put out six issues from the basement of her Lincoln Square home, the latest just a few weeks ago. Though the mix of articles has been eclectic–ranging from the confession of a man saddled with the name Wiener to secrets of Navajo grammar–McKean likes to keep up with pop culture. She’s recruited as a columnist Nick Humez, a classicist respected by amateur lexicographers for his etymological knowledge and breezy writing style. So far, he’s looked at the linguistic roots of terms relating to time, money, and chance. After listening to Michael Adams’s paper on Buffy slang for the American Dialect Society–deemed too frivolous for scholarly publications even though it deals with what McKean calls the “morphological features of the vocabulary of a speech community”–she asked him to abridge it for Verbatim. It was a hit. Other features have included a concise glossary of up-to-date S-M patois (such as “wrapping,” accidentally delivering a whipstroke to the side of the body, where it can leave marks) and a classification of the language of porn sites. (Articles and correspondence from earlier issues are on the Web site, www.verbatimmag.com.) McKean says an upcoming article will discuss abbreviations used in Internet chat rooms.
