In an unusual (for me) flurry of conference attendances I’ve been at two on two successive weekends now.  You kind of get into the habit, sitting in the audience, of joining in on the applause.  So much so that the other night as I lay in bed, listening on my iPod to yet another conference, as the presenter wound up his speech and the crowd began to clap I found myself, alone in my room, prone in bed, automatically joining in and clapping too.

But this post again hearkens back to the Dictionary Society of North America meeting of almost two weeks ago now. One of the presentations there was by Muffy Siegel about how dictionaries were used by university students.  A few of the findings were quite interesting I thought.  No surprise to find that people used dictionaries for looking up word meanings most and spellings second.  But it seems that first year students are less likely to pick up a dictionary at all compared to students who’ve been at university longer.  Students use a dictionary primarily for help in their own writing with a close second place going to looking up things from other people’s writing; with some sort of equity between the degree they use it as an aid for their own speech or in understanding others’ – and roughly equal weight was given to using the dictionary to settle arguments.  I think in my university day’s that would have been my main use, to settle disputes.
One of the more interesting sets of numbers showed that first year students were more likely to use online dictionaries than more senior students.  Dr. Siegel interpreted this to mean that younger students might be more web-savvy but I wonder if it was just the fact that the less mature students tended to use the dictionary less overall, and so the more senior students, being more serious dictionary users overall, were more likely to have a hard-copy dictionary at hand in the first place.

Personally I’d not even qualify for classification in such a study my university days being so far behind me.  But without a doubt I am an online dictionary user.  I have quite a number of paper-based dictionaries within easy reach of my desk, but when I’m writing (and my writing is heavily dictionary dependent) I have at least six online dictionaries open at once, and usually two or three encyclopedia’s as well.

Last week I attended the 16th meeting of the Dictionary Society of North America. Whoda thunk it? Those dictionary people are really a lot of fun. I recorded some audio that I’ll play later as podcasts and I came home with some stories as well so I’ll blog about those a bit over the next few posts.

For starters I’ll tell you about one presentation by Dr. Marco Fiola who talked about a study he’d done into how men and women communicate differently. His findings included such things as women make more geographical references than men, women are more polite and talk in the third person while men have a higer incidence of first person language (this means girls talk about people in general while guys talk about “me”) The most surprising finding was that men in this study wrote more than women. This put me in mind of a Zits cartoon where Jeremy’s girlfriend and some other females are in the first frame talking, and talking so much that the speech bubbles were all overlapped. Below was Jeremy and his male friend; their talk consisted of “hey.” (I’ll post this if I can legally get ahold of it) This seemed to fly in the face of the findings. I approached Marco Fiola afterward to ask him about it and also commented that what he told us explained why men like women, but not at all why women like men.

One of the questions from the audience prompted him to say that he wasn’t suggesting a pink dictionary and a blue dictionary (it turns out there is actually a Cassell’s Pink Dictionary, although it isn’t a dictionary so much as a directory and it isn’t aimed at women but at gays).

Now I thought a pink dictionary and a blue dictionary was a fantastic idea. What I mean by that is, if indeed men and women use words slightly differently, in this electronic age dictionary makers could choose content according to the needs of these different uses. The dictionary business is not exactly like coke where pouring more into advertising will just sell more product. With the changing way that people are accessing information (read electronically) dictionary makers are challenged about how best to respond. Isn’t the idea of pink and blue dictionaries the same as the distinction between men’s and women’s razors? This is product diversification, a smaller slice of the market for each individual product, but a bigger slice when combined.

I have joined booktour.com a web service that lets people know when authors they like are in town. I’ve included three events right off the bat, but people can follow any future book-signings or readings there as well. The three I’ve added today are:

• Saturday, June 09, 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM, WestFest Ottawa WestFestLit at Collected Works Bookstore festival bookstall
• Thursday, June 14 through Sunday June 17, attending the Dictionary Society of North America’s 16th biennial meeting, Oriental Institute 1155 E. 58th Street Chicago, IL 60637
• Sunday, June 24, 11:10 AM, Podcasters Across Borders, Holiday Inn Kingston Waterfront, 2 Princess Street, Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7L 1A2