We are very saddened to have learned of the loss of Katherine Barber, prominent lexicographer of Canadian English and longtime friend and colleague of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto (as well as a singer alongside a proportion of us at St. Thomas's Anglican Church).
Jack Chambers (faculty), who served as Editorial Advisor for the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, has kindly shared this appreciation:
Katherine Barber, known to morning radio listeners in the 1990s as the Word Lady and to countless word-seekers as the editor of the splendid Canadian Oxford Dictionary, died on April 24 of brain cancer. She was 61.
Katherine was a frequent guest at the university. Her last visit was about ten years ago as part of an eclectic usage panel put together by Carol Percy, language maven of the English department, with journalist/cartoonist Warren Clements and others. By then, Oxford University Press had shut down its dictionary department in Canada, and Katherine was engrossed in ballet, her other great passion, as manager and guide for Tours en l’Air, taking balletomanes to performances by the leading companies around the world.
The Canadian Oxford Dictionary, though only one of her accomplishments, was a phenomenon. When it was published in 1998, it was immediately adopted as the standard guidebook by the Canadian Press and most periodicals, and it sat on the Globe and Mail bestseller list for over a year. Its distinction was the result of Katherine's enacting lexicography in its purest form, by assembling readers to pore over documents and keep a record of every meaning and usage they found. That was the method established by the monumental Oxford English Dictionary, and it was laborious – 27 years for the first fascicle, 43 more years for all the rest (1884-1927). Since then, most dictionary-makers have cut corners by using existing databases (notably the OED), and adding as many original documents as practicable. Not Katherine. She trained five readers in her Don Mills office and in five years they pored over 8,000 publications – novels, newspapers, supermarket flyers, Canadian Tire catalogues, and much more. Among its 300,000 entries, they documented hundreds of Canadianisms (including "Canadianism"). Along with the expected "butter tart," "loonie," and "double double," they discovered the idiosyncratically Canadian verbs in "The caretaker will salt the steps," and "I’m going to shovel the driveway," and the homely "mitt" for fingerless woollies as well as the catcher's gear, and "scraper" applied to ice as well as mud or fish scales.
Though soft-spoken, she was the boss lady as well as the Word Lady. One morning, Katherine and I were guests on a CBC radio show called "And Sometimes Y." We were greeted at the station by Tom Howell, the "in-house word nerd" (his description) who had been trained in Katherine's atelier. "I’m surprised you have made it through seven shows," she told him, with a small grin, "before you got around to inviting me." In the company of two people who knew so well what she had accomplished, it just seemed a matter of fact.
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