‘Canada’s Word Lady’ sparked dictionary
Canadian Oxford set new standard
Katherine Barber, Canada’s supreme lexicographer, died in a Toronto hospital on Saturday at the age of 61, her nephew said on Twitter.
The cause was cancer, Mike Barber said.
Barber led the creation of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary (COD), which was first published in 1998. It resides on the desk of every Canadian who has a serious intention of communicating with the world in our own variety of the English language.
It gives authoritative judgments on Canadian argot, spelling and usage, all founded on decades of research and consultation with teeming thousands of language users. When published, it immediately outshone its second-rate schoolhouse predecessors and became a universal professional standard in this country. It’s a monument for the ages, although the last revision came in 2005, and there is no immediate prospect of a successor.
Not for the book, nor for its editor.
Barber described his aunt Kate, as “Canada’s Word Lady, Canadian Oxford Dictionary editor-in-chief, lexicographer nonpareil, ballet aficionada, world traveller, beloved aunt, sister and daughter, friend to countless souls both human and felines.”
The English-born Barber became familiar to ordinary Canadians after the creation of the COD, as she made media appearances as “Canada’s Word Lady” on radio and TV — our appropriately reserved and gentle answer to blustering Samuel Johnson or officious Noah Webster.
Barber was editor-in-chief of Canadian Dictionaries for the Oxford University Press in Canada from 1991 to 2008, when Oxford shut the Canadian department.
Part of the pleasure of the book is chauvinistic. The COD is an assertion — one that has sometimes been contradicted! — in the form of a book: that Canada does have its own English, worthy of recording in the traditional scholarly way with microscopic attention to editorial quality. One imagines it possibly being studied in its own right many thousand years hence, when the sea has swallowed what was known as “Canada” or our home planet is a cinder.