The prehistory of dictionary conferences goes back at least to the mid-nineteenth century, when the members of the Philological Society of London held meetings to discuss the methodology of what would become the Oxford English Dictionary (Gilliver 2016Gilliver, Peter 2016 The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. : 13–38). At the end of the century, the Thesaurus linguae Latinae project was shaped and launched by conference presentations as well as other negotiations (Keudel 1990[Keudel, Ursula] 1990 Thesaurus linguae Latinae: Praemonenda de rationibus et usu operis. Leipzig: Teubner.: 25–26). But making individual dictionaries, even great ones like the Oxford English Dictionary and the Thesaurus linguae Latinae, is a matter of the “art and craft of lexicography” (Landau 2001Landau, Sidney I. 2001 [1984] Dictionaries: The art and craft of lexicography. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.: title-page), whereas thinking about dictionary-making as a whole is a matter of the science of lexicography. Hence Paul Bogaards (1940–2012) began a brief “history of research in lexicography” by saying that “a more focused scientific study of lexicographical works dates from the middle of the twentieth century only” (2013Bogaards, Paul 2013 “A History of Research in Lexicography”. The Bloomsbury Companion to Lexicography ed. by Howard Jackson, 19–31. London etc.: Bloomsbury.: 19). He named three events to make his point. One was the establishment of the journal Cahiers de lexicologie by Bernard Quemada (1926–2018) in 1959Quemada, Bernard 1959 “La mécanisation des inventaires lexicologiques”. Cahiers de lexicologie 1.7–46.; another was the foundation of the Centre de recherche pour un Trésor de la langue française by Paul Imbs (1908–1987) in the following year; and the third was a conference: “In November 1960 a first conference on ‘Problems in Lexicography’ was held in Bloomington, Indiana”.

Fred W. Householder (1913–1994) and Sol Saporta (1925–2008) organized the conference, and were the editors of its proceedings, Problems in Lexicography.11.Adams notes (p. 122, n. 15) that the conference was called “Conference on Lexicography” — there was no other from which it needed to be distinguished — and that the title Problems in Lexicography was newly devised for the book. The book and the conference were isomorphic: each session of the conference became a section of the book, every speaker contributed a chapter, and the invited respondents who summed up the sessions contributed versions of their remarks, though the spontaneous discussion of papers was not transcribed. The book was published in Bloomington, in two issues, both of 1962: as a supplement to the International Journal of American Linguistics, and in a book series directed by the linguist and semiotician Thomas Sebeok (1920–2001), the Publications of the Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics. There was a reprint in 1967 with some interesting short postscripts by contributors, and a scarcely altered second reprint in 1975. The range and quality of the volume can be shown by mentioning only the chapters whose authors are included in the Universal Index of Biographical Names in the Language Sciences (Koerner 2008Koerner, E. F. Konrad 2008 Universal Index of Biographical Names in the Language Sciences. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ).

Of all the chapters in the book, Adams remarks (p. 93), the most influential has been “Lexicographical treatment of folk taxonomies” (243–259), by Harold C. Conklin (1926–2016), founded on Conklin’s Hanunóo–English Vocabulary of 1953Conklin, Harold C. 1953 Hanunóo-English Vocabulary. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Publication in Linguistics., a dictionary of a language of the Philippines. One of Conklin’s examples (254–255) was the taxonomic place of the capsicum called lāda.balaynun.mahārat.qūtin-kutiq (the ‘cat-penis’ variety of the house yard chili pepper) in the minds of speakers of Hanunoo — which is not so much that it is a variety of Capsicum annuum L., as that it is one of the varieties of lāda.balaynun.mahārat, the house yard chili pepper, itself one of the two house yard pepper plants. In a hostile review of a volume of the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, Roy Harris (1931–2015) once wrote that it was time for “New techniques” of lexicography to “come to terms with the fact that the ways words interlock with one another at any given time are just as important as how words are historically related to the usage of past centuries” (1982Harris, Roy 1982 Review of A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 3: O-Scz , ed. by R. W. Burchfield (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1982) Times Literary Supplement, 3 September, 935–936.: 935). The editor of the Supplement, Robert Burchfield (1923–2004), replied bitterly that “people like Professor Harris” might turn their backs on “the castle of the OED” and try to build “a thematic barn, with unalphabetized bins and stalls for kinship terms, colour words and vocabulary from the other closed systems they love so much” (1982Burchfield, Robert 1982 Response to Harris (1982). Times Literary Supplement, 10 September, 973.: 973). Conklin’s chapter argues, on the basis of lexicographical experience, that big, open sets like plant-names call for an engagement with the taxonomic thought of the societies in which they are used, and gives a sense, applicable to sixteenth-century Latin just as much as to twentieth-century Hanunoo, of how that engagement might work. Perhaps no other contributor identified such a widespread, interesting, and soluble problem as he did.

The problem of what Conklin called folk-taxonomy is one of lexicography and culture, and such problems naturally concerned other contributors who had made bilingual dictionaries. So, for instance, Donald Swanson (1914–1976) reflected in his “Recommendations for the selection of entries for a bilingual dictionary” (191–202) that particular words in a given language would reflect features of its speakers’ culture which should not be minimized “by seeking an exact (often artificial) equivalent in the other language”: his lists of examples begin with ars, imperium, pius, and auctoritas in classical Latin; hybris, atē, and logos in ancient Greek; and so on. His list for American English was, in full, “attic, blizzard, ice cream, cocktail, bathroom, date (v), the West, coffee break, drugstore, boyfriend, hitchhike, weekend, teamster” (p. 198).

As for other languages and cultures, Henry and Renée Kahane (1902–1992 and 1907–2002) wrote on “Problems in Modern Greek lexicography” (353–367), beginning with the diglossia of, in their spelling, demotic and katharevusa, and Andreas Tietze (1914–2003) wrote on “Problems of Turkish lexicography” (368–377), beginning with the statement that “Turkish is a language with problems [which] … are essentially of an extralinguistic origin” (p. 368). As well as being involved with separate Greek and Turkish dictionary projects at the time of the conference, these three contributors had made an etymological dictionary together, The Lingua Franca in the Levant: Turkish Nautical Terms of Italian and Greek Origin (Kahane, Kahane, and Tietze 1958Kahane, Henry, Renée Kahane, and Andreas Tietze 1958 The Lingua Franca in the Levant: Turkish nautical terms of Italian and Greek origin. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.). This was not only a work for lexicologists — Yakov Malkiel (1914–1998) wrote that it “undeniably marks the mid-century’s weightiest single contribution to Romance linguistics published in this country [that is, the United States]” — but for cultural historians as well, and another reviewer, in the journal Annales, concluded that it offered “la plus belle preuve que je connaisse de l’unité fondamentale de la Méditerranée”.22. Malkiel 1962Malkiel, Yakov 1962 Review of Kahane, Kahane, and Tietze (1958). Romance Philology 15.346–349.: 346; Romano 1962Romano, Ruggiero 1962 Review of Kahane, Kahane, and Tietze (1958). Annales: Economies, sociétés, civilisations 17.830–831. : 830. Malkiel was still pondering the book many years later: see Malkiel 1993Malkiel, Yakov 1993 Etymology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. : 89–90.

Other chapters dealt explicitly with practicalities, and perhaps they were less influential than Conklin’s partly because the lexicographical practicalities of one generation are not always those of the next. So, for instance, Clarence Barnhart (1900–1993), the leading American lexicographer of his day, gave an overview of “Problems in editing commercial monolingual dictionaries” (278–297), which is still of considerable historical interest.33.Barnhart’s relationship with Indiana University continues, for his archive, 450 cubic feet of it, has been donated to the Lilly Library there. Its summary description at <archives.iu.edu/catalog/InU-Li-VAE1868> suggests that it has much to offer historians of the language sciences. Mary Haas (1910–1996), who had by the time of the Bloomington conference made dictionaries of Thai and of the American language Tunica (the latter drawing on her work with Sesostrie Youchigant (c.1870–1948), its last traditional speaker), asked “What belongs in a bilingual dictionary?” (174–179), proposing, for the sake of argument, that “the ideal bilingual dictionary should serve the needs of the speakers of both languages with equal felicity” (p. 176). A short, incisive chapter by Samuel Martin (1924–2009), whose first dictionary was of Japanese — dictionaries of Dagur and Korean would follow — discussed “Selection and presentation of ready equivalents in a translation dictionary” (271–277), with some sensible remarks following from the point, to which I will return, that “We are now in a period that requires bilingual dictionaries both for the student and for the computer” (271). Herbert Penzl, who had written a grammar of Pashto, although the focus of his interests was in Germanic philology, co-authored a sober account of “Lexicographical problems in Pashto” (343–352) with O. L. Chavarría-Aguilar (1922–2005; not in Koerner 2008Koerner, E. F. Konrad 2008 Universal Index of Biographical Names in the Language Sciences. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ). Allen Walker Read (1906–2002) wrote on “The labeling of national and regional variation in popular dictionaries” (326–334), a topic related to his work on a historical dictionary of Briticisms, then in the form of “a body of nearly 10,000 entries” (p. 330), and never published.

A fairly well-defined group of chapters dealt with dictionaries and grammar. H. A. Gleason (1917–2007), author of the important textbook Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics (1955Gleason, Henry A. 1955 Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics. New York: Henry Holt and Company.), discussed “The relation of lexicon and grammar” (209–226), reflecting in his postscript of 1967 (p. 226) that he would, five years after the first publication of his chapter,

assert much more strongly that we linguists have a responsibility to lexicography that we have continued to shirk, and that neither the practical nor the theoretical questions posed by the relation of lexicon to grammar will be clarified until we have done a great deal more thorough, imaginative, and well-considered lexicographic work and have seen this work as within our central concern as linguists.

Henry Hoenigswald (1915–2003) wrote on “Lexicography and grammar” (227–234) from the point of view of a philologist who was not a lexicographer, concluding that “our dictionaries — those of the classical languages among them — carry a great deal of grammatical information, and […] we have every reason to be thankful for this mixed tradition” (pp. 232–233). The Germanic philologist Kemp Malone (1889–1971) wrote on “Structural linguistics and bilingual dictionaries” (235–242), a chapter which Adams notes has been little cited, perhaps because the aging and eminent author “misconceived his audience and delivered something too basic” (p. 107). To these three may be added the contribution of Uriel Weinreich (1926–1967) on “Lexicographic definition in descriptive semantics” (155–173), quite a strongly theoretical piece. “It would not”, he concluded (p. 173), “be difficult to outline a practical interdisciplinary research program to test the above suggestions for making lexicography more scientific than it has been so far”, to which Madeleine Mathiot (1927–2020) replied that “Such an assertion reveals a surprising degree of methodological naïveté on the part of one who should have known better” (1973Mathiot, Madeleine 1973 Review of La lexicographie (= Langages, no. 19), ed. by Josette Rey-Debove (Paris: Didier 1970) Language 49.961–967.: 963). That was sharply worded, but Mathiot was writing in the year in which her two-volume Dictionary of Papago Usage (1973[-1976?]Mathiot, Madeleine 1973[-1976?] A Dictionary of Papago Usage. 2 vols. Bloomington: Indiana University Publications.) appeared, and although Weinreich was an accomplished lexicographer himself (hence “should have known better”), the tone of the words to which she took exception was one which any other lexicographer might have found irritating.

Finally, Yakov Malkiel’s contribution (133–154) was one of the essays in dictionary taxonomy which preceded his Etymological Dictionaries, a “drastically reduced version” (Malkiel 1976Malkiel, Yakov 1976 Etymological Dictionaries: A tentative typology. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press.: 85) of a paper which had appeared in two parts in recent volumes of his journal Romance Philology. The earlier paper opened as follows:

To the creative linguist lexicography is an essentially ancillary discipline — the art (many prefer to consider it a craft) of manufacturing certain tools of handy information which have proved indispensable to the truly imaginative scholar.(Malkiel 1959–60Malkiel, Yakov 1959–1960 “Distinctive Features in Lexicography: A typological approach to dictionaries exemplified with Spanish”. Romance Philology 12.366–399 and 13.111–155.: 366)

This remark was not reproduced in the recension which appeared in Problems in Lexicography.

As we can see, then, Householder and Saporta gathered a fine roster of participants for a pioneering conference. However, they were, as Adams remarks (pp. 23, 41, 47, and 73), unambitious and even careless proceedings editors. Problems in Lexicography appeared in 1962 with the barest minimum of introductory material and no index; nor was it copy-edited or typeset to the highest professional standards. Adams could have put all that right, stopped there, and earned our thanks.

But he has done much more than that. In terms of scale, his edition accompanies 265 pages of (now properly copy-edited and pleasingly typeset) text with five chapters, or 124 pages, of introduction, and 50 pages of references and index, so he is really giving us two books for the price of one, a new edition of Problems in Lexicography with a slim volume of original commentary. In the introduction, Adams tells us how the conference came to be, starting with the story of how Householder’s war service led years later to his being commissioned to organize a conference which might help with the preparation of dictionaries useful to diplomats and the military. He gives a sparkling, and meticulous, account of the intellectual and professional connections of the participants, and of the editing and publication of the proceedings, and of their reception, this last investigated very effectively. One of his chapters supplies the introduction which Householder and Saporta never wrote, and another is a prosopography of the contributors to the volume. Readers familiar with Adams’s work will find all of its characteristic strengths here. Every sentence is written in enviably stylish and flexible prose: the effect is of very good conversation made legible. The argument is always lucid and interesting. One is never required to notice the breadth and depth of the reading which underlies all that Adams writes: it is, at least in the part of the world of learning which uses English as a medium, most unusual for prose as well-informed as his to be such a pleasure to read. Hardest to articulate is a quality of the humane, particularly salient in the prosopographical chapter: one gets a sense that Adams knew and liked all of the scholars about whom he writes, though there are some whom he can in fact never have met.

Adams describes his introduction as “a joint microhistory” (p. x) of the Bloomington conference and the book which came out of it, and the word microhistory is suggestive. A contrast has been made between two kinds of microhistory. The practitioners of one kind learned to “restrict their focus to smaller and smaller objects of study, from single French provinces to individual villages”, so that “a single microcosm offered […] an opportunity to see the world in a grain of sand”. The practitioners of another kind “reduced the focus of their analyses, reading their sources as if through a microscope, and thereby prioritizing small details, or clues, which they used to unravel the teleology and triumphalism of grand narratives” (Ghobrial 2019Ghobrial, John-Paul A. 2019 “Introduction: Seeing the world like a microhistorian”. Past and Present, Supplement 14.1–22. : 13). I think that Adams’s introduction is a microhistory of the first sort, a history of a particular conference, which offers a surprisingly broad view of one part of the world of learning at a particular moment: “book history, the history of book reviewing, the history of academic networks, and the interweaving of scholarship and life” (p. x), but of course much more as well.

As for microhistory of the second sort, Adams has a good eye for the “details, or clues” to be elicited by a closely focused reading of Problems in Lexicography, though he does have a grand narrative of his own, the story of the rise of lexicography as an academic discipline from the Bloomington conference onwards. He takes note, rightly, of several contributors’ references to the potential application of computers to lexicography, including Martin’s description of the language-processing computer as “a very fast but dumb student, with a literal mind and a nagging insistence on explicit directions”, and Read’s flippant anticipation of the day when it will be possible to say “Switch on the lexicography machine” (pp. 74, 271, and 326). But I think that he might have placed more weight on Householder and Saporta’s failure to see, as participants like Martin were seeing, that a new set of problems in lexicography, namely computational problems, were emerging in the late 1950s, and their failure to invite anyone to their conference to talk about computers and lexicography.

A great deal of near-contemporary activity might have prompted them to do so.44.For an overview of computational lexicography in the period, see Lenders 2013aLenders, Winfried 2013a “The Early History of Computational Lexicography: The 1950s and 1960s”. In Gouws, Schweickard, and Wiegand 2013, 968–982. and 2013bLenders, Winfried 2013b “Computational Lexicography and Corpus Linguistics until ca. 1970/1980”. In Gouws, Schweickard, and Wiegand 2013, 982–1000. . In 1956, for instance, Fr. Roberto Busa (1913–2011), who had been working with IBM on computational approaches to the vocabulary of St Thomas Aquinas since 1949, had founded the Centro per l’automazione dell’analisi letteraria in Gallarate, near Milan (Jones 2016Jones, Steven E. 2016 Roberto Busa, S. J., and the Emergence of Humanities Computing: The priest and the punched cards. New York: Routledge. ). From 1957 onwards, the newsletter Current research and development in scientific documentation reported on electronic dictionary and thesaurus projects, often undertaken with machine translation in mind, such as those of Margaret Masterman (1910–1986) and the members of the Cambridge Language Research Unit, and of Gilbert W. King (1914–1982), then at the International Telemeter Corporation in Los Angeles.55.Nos. 1–15 (1957–1969) of Current research and development in scientific documentation are available via <www​.hathitrust​.org>, and are full of interest. The projects of Masterman and King are reported in no. 1, pp. 4 and 22; for them, see respectively Wilks 2000Wilks, Yorick 2000 “Margaret Masterman”. In Hutchins 2000a, 279–297. and Hutchins 2000bHutchins, [W.] John 2000b “Gilbert W. King and the IBM-USAF Translator”. In Hutchins 2000a, 171–176. . In 1959, the first number of Cahiers de lexicologie opened with articles by Bernard Quemada on “La mecanisation des inventaires lexicologiques” and by A. J. Greimas (1917–1992) on “Les problèmes de la description mécanographique” (Greimas 1959Greimas, A. J. 1959 “Les problèmes de la description mécanographique”. Cahiers de lexicologie 1.47–75.).66.Both are cited in Current research and development in scientific documentation, no. 6, p. 104. Paul Imbs’s lexicographical work was computer-oriented by 1960 if not earlier (Martin 2010Martin, Robert 2010 “Hommage à Paul Imbs (1908–1987)”. Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 154.42–47.: 46). And in November 1960, the same month as the Bloomington conference, a “Kolloquium über maschinelle Methoden der literarischen Analyse und der Lexikographie” took place at Tübingen, attended by Busa and Quemada, by representatives of other dictionary projects — and by Thomas Sebeok of Indiana University, director of the publishing programme in which Problems in Lexicography first appeared (Wisbey 1962Wisbey, Roy 1962 “Concordance Making by Electronic Computer: Some experiences with the ‘Wiener Genesis’”. Modern Language Review 57.161–172. : 167). Sebeok was there because he and his student Valdis J. Zeps (1932–1996) were just finishing a book which had computational lexicography at its heart (see Wisbey 1963Wisbey, Roy 1963 Review of Sebeok and Zeps (1961). American Anthropologist, new ser., 65.1192–1193. , and Sebeok 1997Sebeok, Thomas A. 1997 “My ‘Short Happy Life’ in Finno-Ugric Studies”. Hungarian Studies 12.27–36.: 34), published in the following year as Concordance and Thesaurus of Cheremis Poetic Language (1961Sebeok, Thomas A. & Valdis J. Zeps 1961 Concordance and Thesaurus of Cheremis Poetic Language (= Studies in Cheremis, 8, and Janua Linguarum Series Maior, 8). The Hague: Mouton.).

Sebeok missed the Bloomington conference for a significant reason, and so did Demetrius Georgacas (1908–1990), the editor of the modern Greek dictionary with which the Kahanes were involved (see Georgacas and Georgacas 1990Georgacas, Demetrius J. & Barbara Georgacas 1990 “The Lexicography of Byzantine and Modern Greek”. Wörterbücher / Dictionaries / Dictionnaires (= Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikations Wissenschaft, 5.1–3) ed. by Franz Josef Hausmann, Oskar Reichmann, Herbert Ernst Wiegand & Ladislav Zgusta, 2.1705–1713. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter.: 1710). Adams has located the letter to Householder in which Georgacas explains, inter alia, that the Greek authorities have been unable to fund his air travel to Indiana (p. 17). His discussion of the whole letter is most interesting, and disciplined: he resists the temptation to say more than “sic” at the point in Householder’s reply (p. 19) where Henry and Renée Kahane are “they” in one sentence, but “him” and “his” in the next, and I shall resist it too. Instead, I would like to turn, by way of conclusion, to the point about the air fare.

Transatlantic air fares are much cheaper than they were at the time of Georgacas’ disappointment. For instance, adjusted for inflation, the fare from Toronto, Canada, to London, England, was $ 4,791 in 1959, and $ 892 in February 2023 (Nerman 2023Nerman, Danielle 2023 “Why the Golden Age of Flying is Never Coming Back — and it might not be a Bad Thing”. CBC News, January 29. 〈www​.cbc​.ca​/radio​/costofliving​/golden​-age​-air​-travel​-1​.6726341〉; in Canadian dollars). This is why we have all been living in a golden age of the academic conference. It was natural for the first International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences, convened in Ottawa, Canada, in 1978, to have participants from London, Vancouver, and Tübingen on the programme, and it has been natural for subsequent conferences in the series to be divided between Europe and the Americas.77.The conference poster is available online at <https://​ichols​.org​/history/>. The convenor was E. F. K. Koerner (1939–2022); the poster named R. H. Robins (1921–2000), G. L. Bursill-Hall (1920–1998), and Eugenio Coşeriu (1921–2002). But what comes next? On the one hand, at a meeting in a recent series in which representatives of American learned societies discussed the future of the academic conference, participants reported that they “faced more pressure from members advocating for the return of in-person meetings and of hypermobile academic cultures than from members demanding that their society adopt urgent climate action” (Ruediger et al. 2023Ruediger, Dylan, Jessica Pokharel, Alex Humphreys, Laura Brown & Lindsey Potts 2023 Of Meetings and Members: The Interconnected Future of Conferences and Scholarly Societies. [New York & Ann Arbor:] Ithaka S & R. 〈www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/resrep52768〉. : 23). On the other hand, many of us would agree that it is already harder than it was to take long-distance flights with a clear conscience; that universities and funding bodies will not always encourage long-distance travel as lavishly as they have done in recent decades; that the environmental costs of such travel will come to be reflected in the price of air fares; and that there will, sooner or later, be another global pandemic. Surely the golden age of the academic conference is already at an end, and it is time to start looking back at what the conferences of, let us say, the period from the 1950s to 2018 were, and what they achieved. “Someday”, Adams writes in his preface, “someone will write a fantastic book about the culture of academic conferences” (p. x): the excellence of his microhistory and edition of Problems in Lexicography points the way.