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"Hemphill sees the Hip Hop Word Count as a resource for settling arguments. “There’s a lot of disputes in rap—who influenced whom—who came first,” he said. “Everybody is always asking, ‘Who is the goat rapper, the greatest of all time?’ Mostly, it’s settled by who has the loudest voice in the room, but now people will be able to put some metrics to it. Is it the guy with the most complicated lyrics, or the most innovative? The one with the densest words? You could even answer something like ‘Which sneaker is more hip-hop, Nike or Adidas?’ ”
Hemphill entered both terms in the database. “Two hundred and fifty-two entries for Adidas, and Nike has five hundred and fifty-eight,” he said. With the reserve of the social scientist, however, he added, “But you have to take into account that Nike is way easier to rhyme than Adidas."— Alec Wilkinson talks to Tahir Hemphill about Hip Hop Word Count, a database of fifty thousand rap songs, beginning in 1979, that traces how words travel through rap music, and how slang evolves: http://nyr.kr/ZGIOib(Source: newyorker.com)
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The Case of the Missing O.E.D. Words
An article… in the Guardian—excerpted on Gawker and many other places, and widely retweeted—highlighted the claim that Robert Burchfield, the editor of the four-volume “Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary” published from 1972 to 1986, “covertly deleted thousands of words because of their foreign origins.”
This claim is completely bogus…
Jesse Sheidlower editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary, explains what really happened in the case of the missing words: http://nyr.kr/Tr9crS
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Reflections on the Winning Board of the 2012 Scrabble Nationals: A Poem by Judith Thurman http://nyr.kr/OHq8ae
