Why did the OED reject ‘it’s all bananas’ from the Gershwin song?
Wordhunters found evidence of the word bananas in the 1930 Gershwin song But Not For Me in the line “It’s all bananas”. But the OED rejected this for being the wrong sense of the word. But have Wordhunters discovered an entirely new meaning for bananas worthy of a mention in the OED?
John Simpson, OED Chief Editor: It’s sometimes claimed that we collect more instances of words and meanings that don’t make it into the OED than we do for terms that do finally find a place in the dictionary. The problem with these excluded terms is that there simply isn’t enough documentary evidence available to be sure that they have (or had) a significant place in the language. English is full of outliers or borderline cases, which sparkle for a moment and then disappear, leaving no appreciable effect on the language.
This was the case with the Gershwin example. We identified instantly that it wasn’t an early example of bananas in the sense ‘mad, crazy’, which was the sense we were looking for. So was there any other reason to include it in the OED? Certainly, it seemed to represent a slang use of the word earlier than the ‘mad’ sense, but even after hunting around in various files and dictionaries we were unable to collect together enough evidence to illustrate that the use had had any real longevity. That’s not to say that it’ll never be included in the OED, but just that at present it has to go back into the files waiting for more evidence to come to light.
How do the OED go about defining a word?
The organizers of Bonkers Fest who featured in the One Sandwich Short of a Picnic episode took exception to one of the OED's definitions of the word normal, when used as a noun (“A normal variety of something; esp. a sound, healthy, or unimpaired person”). So how do the OED go about defining a word?
John Simpson: Writing a good definition comes at the end of a long line of processes. Oxford definitions are based principally on the way words are used in the evidence we’ve collected. That’s one of the reasons we asked Wordhunters to supply real examples of words in context. It’s the context that allows the lexicographer to analyse meaning, and to see how a word is typically used within a sentence. This helps to remove subjective bias.
Once the lexicographer has assimilated the available documentary evidence – and has hunted out more if there are still gaps – then he or she must decide of the key features of the term that need defining. Not all the features indicated by all the pieces of evidence will be included. The lexicographer is looking for those aspects that are central to a term’s meaning. And then once the key features have been isolated, then comes the task of converting a series of ideas into an elegant, concise definition.
Sometimes it helps to write a rough definition, which you know isn’t quite right, and then to refine it – adding phrases, playing with different adjectives, reordering the facts, etc., so that in the end you have the essence of the meaning of a word in a nutshell: objective, accurate, elegant, and informative.
There isn’t just one ‘correct’ definition for any word. Different editors will come up with different formulations, but they’ll all share the same vital properties. The most difficult thing for a lexicographer to learn is to keep it simple. I’m often telling editors that if a definition is complex and difficult to read, it’s wrong – and they should go back to the drawing board.