Earth). A questionnaire he had sent out in
1948 to thousands by mail from Madison, asking about slang usage in the rural communities
of Wisconsin, was being seen as a model of its
kind, a signal success. And by the late sixties,
he was well on the way to making a name for
himself: consolidating his advancing reputation, his Dictionary of Jamaican English (with
the etymologies of rather daring new words like
“ganja” and “dreadlocks,” and some thousands
of others besides) would be winning glowing
reviews on its publication in 1967.
In 1962, however, Cassidy had begun to
badger the ADS. Could they not, he asked (and
then kept on asking), initiate a great dictionary
project too, a project that would do for America
what the EDS had done for Britain? It took a
while for his pleas to be answered, but in 1963
the ADS leadership agreed. And then, in pon-
dering how best to go about creating such a
massive masterwork, the Society came swiftly to
con;rm what Cassidy already suspected: that he,
Cassidy, was the best possible candidate to spear-
head the e;ort. He had su;cient wood, as the
Jamaicans like to say, to create the very diction-
ary which America so badly needed. However,
it was far from an easy project to begin. Aside
from the lists published in the various pamphlets
and journals of the ADS, there was precious little
material to use as ;re starter. Cassidy had no
two-thousand-pound benison of yellowed word-
slips bestowed upon him. Most of the data for
his great dictionary would have to be assembled
anew. But just like James Murray, who famously
worked under the OED’s guiding principle that
to collect all English words, all English writing
had to be read, Cassidy decided to think big. To
collect all American regional speech, all Ameri-
can language had to be listened to and recorded,
and all American regions had to be visited. Such
a monumental work would take time, people—
and money.
Dispatches from the Front Lines
c. 500 ;;: Persia
Persians play kettle drums
to maintain cavalry
formations and frighten
their enemies.
c. 200 ;;: China
Signal towers along Great Wall use smoke
during the day and ;re by night—and drums
during fog—to indicate an enemy presence.
c. 330 ;;: Macedonia
Alexander the Great
constructs a giant
megaphone to send out
messages to his troops up
to 10 miles away.
43 ;;: Mutina
While Marc Antony
besieges the city, Aulus
Hirtius sends swimmers
across river with messages
inscribed on iron plates to
his ally, Decimus Brutus.
c. 1200: Spain
A system known as
apellido utilizes trumpets,
drums, bells, and
bon;res to assemble
local militias against
invasions and raids.
500 ;;
0
1200
480 ;;: Persia
Xerxes devises a courier system
consisting of horsemen posted at
one-day intervals to announce his
defeat at Salamis.
c. 1200: Mongolia
Genghis Khan establishes in his
Mongol capitol a pigeon post that
reaches one-sixth of the globe.
c. 400 ;;: Sparta
Two commanders possess identical batons around which leather
strips can be wound and written on vertically, so the message is
clear only when re-wrapped around an identical baton.
