Thursday, September 29, 2011

Oh Yes, THOSE Trees

Entry of the Day:
Anatiferous in Johnson's Dictionary

ANATI'FEROUS. adj. [from anas and fero, Lat.] Producing ducks.

If there be anatiferous trees, whose corruption breaks forth into barnacles; yet, if they corrupt, they degenerate into maggots, which produce not them again. Brown's Vulgar Errours.
Just think of the countless times you've been in conversation, searching for an adjective that refers to things that make ducks. Well, now you know.

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Take That, George Carlin

Entry of the Day:
Cream-Stick in Farmer & Henley

From Farmer & Henley's Slang and Its Analogues, 2 vols., 1890, s.v. cream-stick:
Aaron's rod, Adam's arsenal, the Old Adam, arbor vitae, arse-opener, arse-wedge, athenaeum, bayonet, bean-tosser, beak, beef, bag of tricks, belly-ruffian, Billy-by-Nag, bludgeon, Blueskin, bracmard, my body's captain, broom-handle, bum-tickler, bush-beater, bush-whacker, butter-knife, catso or gadso, child-getter, chink-stopper, clothes-prop, club, cock, concern, copper-stick, crack-hunter, cracksman, cranny-hunter, cuckoo, cunny-catcher, crimson chitterling, dagger, dearest member, dicky, dibble, dirk, Don Cypriano, doodle, drooping member, drumstick, eye-opener, father-confessor, cunny-burrow ferret, fiddle-bow, o-for-shame, flute, fornicator, garden-engine and gardener (garden = the female pudendum), gaying instrument, generation tool, goose's neck, cutty gun, gut-stick, hair- (or beard-) splitter, hair-divider, Hanging Johnny, bald-headed hermit, Irish root, Jack-in-the-box, Jack Robinson, jargonelle, Jezebel, jiggling-bone, jock, Dr. Johnson, Master John Goodfellow, John Thomas, Master John Thursday, man Thomas, jolly-member, Julius Caesar, knock-Andrew, lance of love, life-preserver, live sausage, Little Davy, lollipop, lullaby, machine, man-root, marrow-bone, marrow-bone-and-cleaver, member for Cockshire, merry-maker, middle-leg, mouse, mole, mowdiwort, Nebuchadnezzar, nilnisistando, Nimrod, nine-inch-knocker, old man, peace-maker, pecker, pecnoster, pego, pestle, pike, pike-staff, pile-driver, pintle, pizzle, plougshare, plug-tail, pointer, poperine pear, Polyphemus, pond-snipe, prick, prickle, privates, private property, privy member, quim-stake, Roger, rolling-pin, root, rudder, rump-splitter, Saint Peter (who "keeps the keys of Paradise"), sausage, scepter, shove-straight, sky-scraper, solicitor-general, spindle, sponge, staff of life, stern-post, sugar-stick, tarse, tent-peg, thing, thumb of love, tickle-gizzard, tickle-toby, tool, toy, trifle, trouble-giblets, tug-mutton, unruly member, vestryman, watch-and-seals, wedge, whore-pipe, wimble, yard, Zadkiel.

Then we run through French (le sansonnet, le glaunt, l'asticot, le jambot), German (Bletzer, Breslauer, Bruder, Butzelmann, Fiesel, Dickmann, Pinke, Schmeichaz, Schwanz), and Portuguese (Pae de todos, porra, virgolleiro, pica, bacamarte, a montholia de Pastor).

If you ask nicely, I may give you the corresponding entries classed under "MONOSYLLABLE."  That goes on for three pages in English, four in French, two in German, and half a page each for Spanish and Portuguese.  Highlights: "best in Christendom," "bower of bliss," "Cockshire," "Cupid's Highway," "happy hunting grounds," "Mount Pleasant," "penwiper," and "vade-mecum."

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Pure Ignorance

Blunder of the Day:
Pastern in Johnson's Dictionary

(The first in a continuing, albeit intermittent, series of posts on instances of inattention, foolishness, and incompetence in reference books, leading to booboos, howlers, ghost-words, and screw-ups of every description.)

In his Dictionary of 1755, Samuel Johnson defined a pastern simply as “The knee of an horse.” But the pastern isn't the knee at all; it's actually the part of the foot between the fetlock and the hoof. At least he was forthright about it. “A lady once asked him how he came to define Pastern” that way. Boswell tells us that “Instead of making an elaborate defence, as she expected, he at once answered, ‘Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.’”

Monday, September 26, 2011

Ductor in Linguas

Reference Book of the Day:
Minsheu, Ductor in Linguas

Minsheu, John. Ηγημων εις τας γλωσσας· id est, Ductor in Linguas, The Guide into Tongues: Cum Illarum Harmonia, & Etymologijs, Originationibus, Rationibus, & Deriuationibus in Omnibus his Vndecim Linguis, viz: 1. Anglica. 2. Cambro-Britanica. 3. Belgica. 4. Germanica. 5. Gallica. 6. Italica. 7. Hispanica. 8. Lusitanica seu Portugallica. 9. Latina. 10. Græca. 11. Hebrea. London, 1617.

Oh, how I love extravagant sixteenth- and seventeenth-century displays of over-the-top erudition. Things like the Dictionarium Græcolatinum (1568), Ortelius's Thesaurus geographicus (1578), Raleigh's History of the World (1614), Alsted's seven-volume Compendium philosophicum stretching to 2,404 folio pages (1626), Brian Walton's polyglot Bible in six huge folios (1654–57), and Chauvin's Lexicon rationale (1692). These are books that Tony Grafton was reading in his crib, but to the rest of us they're insane compendia of obscure learning that we'll never hope to master.
(I was going to write "people like Tony Grafton," but I realized there are no people like Tony Grafton.)

One of the craziest is Minsheu's Ductor in Linguas. Almost nothing is known of Minsheu himself. He was probably born in 1559 or 1560. The ODNB says he is of "unknown parentage," and provides what little information we have about his family:
He refers to a cousin living in Oxfordshire, John Vesey, who was a self-made man of dubious probity. Minsheu may have resembled him in these two respects: he was educated by extensive travels rather than in a university, and he was described as a rogue by Ben Jonson.
Somewhere he picked up proficiency in Spanish, something that had particular resonance in the age of the Armada. He apparently learned much of his Spanish while he was being imprisoned in Spain.

He published a few works on the Spanish language, beginning with an expansion of Richard Percyvall's Spanish dictionary and following it up with a Spanish grammar. But he found his metier some time around 1611, when he published a two-page prospectus for a
Glosson-etymologicon. (Id est.) the etymologie of tongues; or, A most ample and copiovs dictionary etymologicall, that is, the reasons and erivations, of all (or the most part) of works, in eleuen languages: viz. 1. English, 2. British or welsh, 3. High Dutch (sometime Saxon) 4. Low Dutch, (sometime Danish) 5. French, 6. Italian, 7. Spanish, (sometime Arabick) 8. Portugall, 9. Latine, 10. Greeke, 11. Hebrew, (and sometimes the Chalie and Syriack tongues.) ... In the end also 10. tables most copiovs to find ovt any workd in any of these eleven langvages; whereby it serves for a dictionaie [sic] in all these languages, ... Also diuers other necessary notes, and especiall directions, in this dictionarie, for the speedy obtaining any of these, or other tongues. By the industry, labour, and onely expences of Iohn Minsheu, who for these many yeares, hath maintained many scholars and strangers about his worke, ... A true copy of the hands of certaine learned men, in approbation, and confirmation of this worke.
That work came to fruition in 1617 as Ηγημων εις τας γλωσσας· id est, Ductor in Linguas — the Greek at Latin for "Guide into the Tongues."

The book is organized around an English word-list, and provides translations into ten languages (Welsh, Dutch, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew). It's more than 700 crowded double-columned folio pages. Minsheu was the first to arrange a polyglot dictionary around an English alphabet, which makes sense, given his desire of making foreign languages easier for English-speakers.

Minsheu did much of the work himself, though he did employ native speakers of the modern languages to read through the best writers to collect information.

Modern critics have shown that Minsheu's pedagogical aims were admirable, but his scholarly credentials were shaky at best. He wasn't above plagiarism, and his learning wasn't nearly as deep as it seemed. Critic Jürgen Schäfer delivers the harsh verdict:
Far from being a Renaissance etymologist in the true sense of the word, Minsheu must have compiled his etymologies together with the rest of his material without regard to etymological principles or consistency.

But I'm still in love with the sheer copiousness of the learning, the delight in excess for its own sake, and the passion for what D. W. Jefferson called "learned wit."

Sunday, September 25, 2011

The Ententiue Partes of Mannes Vnderstanding

Reference Book of the Day:
Damiano, The Pleasaut and Wittie Playe of Cheasts Renewed


Damiano da Odenara. The Pleasaunt and Wittie Playe of the Cheasts Renewed with Instructions Both to Learne It Easely, and to Play It Well: Lately Translated out of Italian into French: And Now Set Furth in Englishe by Iames Rowbothum. London, 1562.

Not every reference book is strictly utilitarian — not every reference book, in other words, tells its users things they need to know. Many tell them what they simply want to know, and how they might amuse themselves. This explains the abundance of reference works that teach readers to play games.

Among the first guides to a board game in English is a compendium of advice on chess, The Pleasaunt and Wittie Playe of the Cheasts Renewed, by the Portuguese pharmacist Pedro Damião of Odemira. His Questo libro e da imparare giocare a scachi et de li partiti was originally written in Italian in 1512, then translated into French, and finally into English in 1562. The subtitle to the English edition promises “Instructions Both to Learne It Easely, and to Play It Well.

James Rowbothum, the English translator, thought he was performing an important service to the state. In his dedication to Robert Dudley, Queen Elizabeth’s favorite, he explained the genuine advantages of chess-playing. Chess would help statesmen understand “the graue and waightye affaires of Princes,” he explained, and would also provide some recreation to those who sought a workout not for the body but for the mind: they would find themselves “exercised not with the outward strength of the bodye, but with the inwarde force of witte and intelligence, to the great sharpening of the ententiue partes of mannes vnderstanding.”

Those who take up chess would develop “a certaine studye, pollicie, wit, forcast, memorie, with other properties, to make men circumspect not onelye in playing this game, but also comparing it to a publick gouernement, or more properly a batttel.”

Saturday, September 24, 2011

"W00t," "Sexting" Now Officially Real Words

A few weeks ago I did a profile of Webster's Third New International, the most controversial dictionary of the twentieth century.

In this weekend's New York Times Book Review, Geoff Nunberg — a linguist at Berkeley, and one of the few academic linguists who writes well for a lay audience — has his own profile on Webster's Third. The whole thing is worth reading, but he has some particularly good material on a topic of perennial interest, how new words get into "the dictionary":
In retrospect, in fact, the Third seems downright fusty. Word harvesting in Gove’s time hadn’t changed since Samuel Johnson, with readers patiently culling citations from printed works. Now the Internet puts tens of thousands of new words at the lexicographer’s fingertips, the great majority of them technical terms, media stunt words like “Brangelina” and “sexploits,” or what Dr. Johnson would have called the “fugitive cant” of chat rooms, tweets and social networks (think of “meep” and “w00t”). And modern dictionaries don’t keep words waiting in the vestibule long. Over the last year the Oxford English Dictionary has inducted “wassup,” “BFF” and “muffin top” (of the abdominal, not the culinary, variety). The new Chambers Dictionary includes “freegan” and “geek chic,” and Merriam-­Webster has recently added “staycation.” Not that lexicographers will include any word that swims into their ken: so far they’ve drawn the line at “refudiate,” though the editors of the Oxford American chose it for their 2010 Word of the Year. But nowadays the dictionary is about as hard to get into as Sam’s Club.

A lot of these items will expire before your hamster does. But there’s little need for a bouncer at the door once dictionaries go online, where space is effectively limitless. And one can make room in print editions by tossing out last season’s fads, like “yadda, yadda” and “Monicagate,” both of which were proffered as evidence of the up-to-­dateness of the Encarta World English Dictionary when it was published in 1999. (Though it was perhaps rash for the Oxford Concise to squeeze in “jeggings” and “mankini” by dropping “cassette tape,” a word that may yet require elucidation for antiquarians poring over early issues of Rolling Stone.)
Nunberg goes on to observe that "publishers know it’s the pop-culture words that the media will write about, under headings like '"W00t," "Sexting" Now Officially Real Words.' And where critics once railed at dictionaries for including popular slang, now they greet it appreciatively." He goes on to remind readers that lexicographers squirm uncomfortably with this idea of "approving" or "admitting" "real words."

Friday, September 23, 2011

Livres à lire d’une seule main

Reference Book of the Day:
Aristotle’s Master-Piece

[The beginning of the semester, with all the usual attendant craziness, has kept me from this blog for the last two weeks. But now I can get back to it, albeit probably not daily. Ill make up for the long silence by serving up a particularly juicy one today.]

Aristotle’s Master-Piece; or, The Secrets of Generation Display’d in All the Parts Thereof: Containing 1. The Signs of Barrenness. 2. The Way of Getting a Boy or Girl. 3. Of the Likeness of Children to Parents. 4. Of the Infusion of the Soul into the Infant. 5. Of Monstruous Births, and the Reasons Thereof. 6. Of the Benefit of Marriage to Both Sexes. 7. The Prejudice of Unequal Matches. 8. The Discovery of Insufficiency. 9. The Cause and Cure of the Green Sickness. 10. A Discourse of Virginity. 11. How a Midwife Ought to Be Qualified. 12. Directions and Cautions to Midwives. 13. Of the Organs of Generation in Women. 14. The Fabrick of the Womb. 15. The Use and Action of the Genitals. 16. Signs of Conception, and Whether of a Male or Female. 17. To Discover False Conception. 18. Instructions for Women with Child. 19. For Preventing Miscarriage. 20. For Women in Child-Bed ... To Which Is Added, a Word of Advice to Both Sexes in the Act of Copulation, and the Pictures of Several Monstrous Births: Very Necessary for All Midwives, Nurses, and Young-Married Women. London, 1690.

Probably the most notorious seventeenth-century sex manual bore the strange title Aristotle’s Masterpiece. This book bears a fake author’s name — the Greek philosopher had nothing to do with it — in order to give the work some measure of respectability. The ruse didn’t work; Aristotle’s Masterpiece was banned in Britain until the 1960s. But the prohibition didn’t keep it from circulating: it was one of the most notorious, and widely distributed, sex books in the English language.

The long title page gives little idea of the contents. True, the promised “pictures of several monstrous births” offers a kind of prurient glance at gruesome birth defects. But the book was notorious for other reasons. It wasn’t marketed to midwives, and “nurses and young-married women” were not the real audience. Much of the book was read as pornography, pure and simple.

From a twenty-first-century point of view, the seventeenth-century pornography doesn’t always seem very pornographic. In fact Aristotle’s Masterpiece sometimes reads more like a sermon than a sex guide. “It plainly appears in Holy Writ,” the book declares, “that this glorious Vniverse, bespangled with gaudy Fires, and every where adorned with wonderful objects, proclaiming the Wisdom and Omnipotence of the Great Work-Master, who in Six Days Erected all Things for his Pleasure.” Maybe erected is a dirty pun, but the sentiment is wholesome enough, and the point is that God created sex for humanity’s pleasure — not a heretical belief, but one embraced by the Puritans themselves in seventeenth-century England. “That Marriage is an Honourable State,” writes the author, “ordained by God in Paradice, and since Confirmed by our Blessed Saviour, who wrought his first Miracle at a Wedding, I hope none will deny; therefore it is convenient that Parents well take care of their Daughters Chastity.” No need to blush there.

But once the book gets going, there’s little doubt that the book would be categorized as what Jean-Jacques Rousseau called a “livre à lire dune seule main,” a “book to be read with one hand.” In fact its very popularity makes it difficult to study today. We’re not even certain when the first edition was printed; few copies of the early editions survive, since most of them have been read (and, no doubt, otherwise used) until they fell apart.



This is one that can be read online: an electronic edition includes plain text, HTML, and PDF versions.

Sunday, September 4, 2011

Admirable Artifice

Reference Book of the Day:
Napier, Mirifici logarithmorum

Napier, John. Mirifici logarithmorum canonis descriptio ejusque usus, in utraque trigonometria; ut etiam in omni logistica mathematica, amplissimi, facillimi, & expeditissimi explicatio: Authore ac inventore, Ioanne Nepero, Barone Merchistonii, &c. Scoto. Edinburgh, 1614.

Rockin' title-page, huh?
John Napier discovered the logarithm — at least, he was one of several in the early seventeenth century to understand the principles behind logarithms, and the first to publish the fruits of his research in Mirifici logarithmorum.

It's not easy to understand what Napier is saying, and that's not only because (a) it's about logarithms and (b) it's in Latin. No; we also have to reckon with the fact that (c) his definitions aren't at all intuitive for those who've learned modern definitions of exponentiation and logarithms. His definition, for instance, is geometric, not algebraic:
Linea æqualiter crescere dicitur, quum punctus eam describens, æqualibus momentia per æqualia intervalla progreditur.
It comes with a diagram:
And as one historian describes it,
Logarithms, as Napier first understood them, and even logarithms in the later from agreed upon by him and Briggs, did not appear to their inventor in the light in which we now regard them. The modern exponential notation an was not yet invented, and it was not for more than a hundred years that the idea of a logarithm as the index of the power of the base found a place in works on algebra. Indeed, in the original system of Napier, there is no mention of a base system at all; and in the modified and improved system, though as a matter of fact it does in a sense consist of logarithms to the base 10, no stress is laid upon that point. (Carslaw, “The Discovery of Logarithms,” p. 77)
He also doesn't use the base-10 logarithms that are familiar to those who care about such things today. (Shortly after he published his book, he realized base-10 logs were a better idea, and he published several follow-ups.)

After a theoretical discussion of this new kind of number, he devotes eighty-eight pages to his table:

It seems exceedingly obscure, but Napier's discovery in pure mathematics was absolutely crucial for advances in applied math for centuries to come. As Edmund Wingate put it in Logarithmotechnia; or, The Construction, and Use of the Logarithmeticall Tables (1635),
For as much as amongst many inventions, that concerne the Mathematicks, none can be found comparable to this of the Logarithmes, the worthy labours of those Learned men which have endevoured [sic] to advance it, are to be prized accordingly.
Pierre-Simon Laplace, the nineteenth-century French mathematician and astronomer, marveled at this “admirable artifice which, by reducing to a few days the labour of many months, doubles the life of the astronomer, and spares him the errors and disgust inseparable from long calculations.” A nineteenth-century book on logarithms makes their labor-saving value clear: “This method,” James Mill Peirce writes, “has contributed very powerfully to the modern advance of science, and especially of astronomy, by facilitating the laborious calculations without which that advance could not have been made.”

The Mirifici gives the logs of integers up to 1,000 to eight decimal places; he left it to his successor, Henry Briggs, to work out 30,000 more logarithms to fourteen decimal places: if you're dying to read that, ask your local bookseller to order Arithmetica logarithmica sive Logarithmorum chiliades triginta, pro numeris naturali serie crescentibus ab unitate ad 20,000: et a 90,000 ad 100,000 Quorum ope multa perficiuntur arithmetica problemata et geometrica. Hos numeros primus invenit clarissimus vir Iohannes Neperus baro Merchistonij: eos autem ex eiusdem sententia mutavit, eorumque ortum et vsum illustravit Henricus Briggius, in celeberrima Academia Oxoniensi geometriae professor Savilianus (1624).

Or you can wait for the movie.



The best short introduction is an article: H. S. Carslaw, “The Discovery of Logarithms by Napier,” The Mathematical Gazette 8, no. 117 (May 1915): 76–84; no. 118 (July 1915): 115–19. Even more accessible is Jack Oliver, “The Birth of Logarithms,” Mathematics in School 29, no. 5 (Nov. 2000): 9–13. Serious, hard-core geeks, though, will want to work their way through the whole of M. Campbell-Kelly, M. Croarken, R. Flood, and E. Robson, eds., The History of Mathematical Tables: From Sumer to Spreadsheets (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003). I've not only read it, but have taken ten single-spaced typed pages of notes, just to ensure my nerd credentials are beyond question.

Saturday, September 3, 2011

Erya

Reference Book of the Day:
Erya

The Erya (or Erh Ya) — the name means “approaching what is correct, proper, refined,” though it's sometimes translated as The Ready Guide — is the oldest dictionary of the Chinese language. The author is a mystery, and the traditional attribution to the Duke of Chou isn't taken seriously. The date, too, is a puzzler, though “scholars generally agree that it was written by Confucian scholars sometime between the Spring and Autumn period and early Han Dynasty (8th through 2nd centuries B.C.)” (Xue, p. 152). The third century BCE is a pretty good guess.

Erya contains glosses on just over 4,300 words drawn from pre–Qin Dynasty Chinese literature. It's hard to make reliable claims about works this old, but some have called it the first-ever monolingual dictionary in the world. It originally had twenty chapters, though only nineteen survive.

Chinese lacks an alphabet; the logographical system doesn’t have any obvious order. For a long time, Chinese dictionaries have been ordered according to the “radicals” of the Chinese characters, making it possible (though hardly easy) to find them in a reference book. When the Erya was compiled, though, that system had not yet been developed, so the anonymous creator organized his work by subject. This places the work in a middle ground between a dictionary, a thesaurus, and an encyclopedia. The first three chapters cover "common words" (verbs and grammatical function words), and chapters 4 through 19 define words from specialized areas: tools, plants, animals, kinship, the calendar, and so on.

Typical entries (I can't vouch for the diacritical marks, I'm afraid):
A woman calls her husband’s father jìu, and her husband’s mother . While alive they are called jūnjìu and jūngū. after their death they are called xiānjìu and xiāngū.

Water feeding into a stream is called , feeding into a is called , feeding into a is called gōu, feeding into a gōu is called kùai, feeding into a kùai is called .

The fèi fèi (baboon) looks like a human being. It has dishevelled hair, walks rapidly and eats humans. (Xue, p. 153)
National Palace Museum, Taiwan
The Erya's shortcomings — it's a fascinating book, but not especially useful as a practical reference — led to a series of commentaries over many centuries, including Guo Pu's Erya Zhu (Annotations on Erya, early fourth century), Xing Bing's Erya Shu (Explanations of Annotations on Erya, late tenth or early eleventh century), and Hao Yixing's  Erya Zhengyi (Meaning Verification of Erya, late eighteenth century).

During the Song Dynasty (960–1279), Erya was named one of the Thirteen Confucian Classics.



Some readings: Xue Shiqui, “Chinese Lexicography Past and Present,” Dictionaries 4 (1982): 151–69; Endymion Porter Wilkinson, Chinese History: A Manual, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Asia Center, 2000); and Heming Yong and Jing Peng, Chinese Lexicography: A History from 1046 BC to AD 1911 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008).

Friday, September 2, 2011

I Wish I Knew Dutch

Reference Book of the Day:
Komrij’s kakafonie

Komrij, Gerrit, ed. Komrij’s kakafonie, oftewel Encyclopedie van de stront: omvattende de symbolische waarde, de kont, het kakken, de kleur, de stank, de wind, het sanitair, de liefhebbers, satire & nonsens, stront en het boek, lexicografie, enz. enz. Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2006.

I am, alas, Dutchless. But, from what I can piece together, the title means Komrij’s Cacaphony; or, Encyclopedia of Shit: Comprising Its Symbolic Value, the Ass, Shitting, Color, Smell, Farting, Toilets, Enthusiasts, Satire and Nonsense, Shit and the Book, Lexicography, etc., etc. (Don’t miss the pun on caca in kakaphony.)

It is, if you can believe it, the only book to which the Library of Congress has so far seen fit to award the subject headings Defecation — Encyclopedias, Feces — Encyclopedias, and Toilets — Encyclopedias. (I love the fact that the LoC Cataloging in Publication folks, after careful consideration, decided they needed separate headings for defecation and feces.)

Shockingly, the book is not easily available in the good ol’ US of A, which means I probably won’t get my hands on it. And even if I did, well, I don’t read Dutch. I’ll just have to lament what might have been.

Meanwhile, I beg my Batavophone readers to get to work immediately on an English translation of this work. The lack of an English version is one of the greatest injustices facing the modern world.

Never let it be said this investigation of reference books is anything less than a highbrow intellectual endeavor.

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Titles

Some miscellaneous reference books I haven’t seen, and about which I know nothing more than their titles — but what lovely titles they are:
  • Encyclopedia of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu
  • A Dictionary of the Language of Mota, Sugarloaf Island, Banks’ Islands, with a Short Grammar and Index
  • Encyclopedia of Death 
  • A Dictionary of Sexist Quotations
  • Encyclopedia of Heavy Metal, with a foreword by Ronnie James Dio
  • Atlas of Northwestern Elevators
  • Encyclopedia of Conditioning Rinse Ingredients
  • Arkheologicheskii slovar kamennykh orudii (Archaeological Dictionary of Stone Tools
  • Dung Fungi: An Illustrated Guide to Coprophilous Fungi in New Zealand
  • Encyclopedia of Murder & Violent Crime 
  • Les seins: Encyclopédie historique et bizarre des gorges, mamelles, poitrines, pis et autres tétons: Des origines à nos jours (Breasts: A Strange and Historical Encyclopedia of Boobs, Mammaries, Chests, Breasts, and Nipples: From the Beginnings to Today)
  • Foolish Dictionary: An Exhausting Work of Reference to Un-Certain English Words, Their Origin, Meaning, Legitimate and Illegitimate Use, Confused by a Few Pictures, Executed by Gideon Wurdz
  • Encyclopedia Horrifica: The Terrifying Truth! about Vampires, Ghosts, Monsters, and More
  • Talkin’ that talk: Le langage du blues et du jazz 
  • 1001 Wörter Lkw-Werkstatt: Deutsch, English, français, ʻArabi (1001 Words for Truck Workshop)
  • Precancelled Envelopes of the United States
  • The Zombie Dictionary (included in  Zombie Code: Keys to Unlocking Your Undead Destiny)
  • Atlas of Hair and Scalp Diseases
  • 6-sprachiges Süsswarenfachwörterbuch (Six-Language Technical Dictionary of the Confectionery Industry)
Oh, had we but world enough and time!