Celebrating 30 years of the Dictionary of Newfoundland English:
DNE Reminiscences
Friday November 9, 2012
Memorial University
Program
2012 marks the 30th anniversary of the publication of the Dictionary of
Newfoundland English. All of this evening’s speakers have some connection to the
DNE or their colleagues and they have come together to share stories about the
editors, Drs. Story, Kirwin and Widdowson. Friend and colleague of the editors,
Shane O’Dea, will be acting as master of ceremonies.
Shane O'Dea, Professor Emeritus of English and Public Orator at Memorial, has long
been involved with preservation in Newfoundland. He has chaired the boards of Heritage
Canada, the Newfoundland Heritage Foundation, the Newfoundland Historic Trust and the
Newfoundland Historical Society. Co-author of two books on Newfoundland buildings, he has
published a number of articles and reviews in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Macmillan
Encyclopedia of Architects, Canadian Review of American Studies and Newfoundland Studies. In
1988 he was Memorial University’s first Distinguished Teacher and Canadian Professor of the
Year. In 2002 he was made a 3M Teaching Fellow and in 2005 was appointed to the Order of
Newfoundland and Labrador.
Robert Hollett, a former Head of the English department of Memorial University, has
researched various aspects of Newfoundland and Labrador English, in particular place names
and allegro speech patterns. His interests also include the phonetic and phonological aspects of
local speech. He edited Regional Language Studies . . . Newfoundland from 1984 until 1987, and
has served for many years on the Management Committee of the English Language Research
Centre. His publications include Place Names of the Northern Peninsula (ISER, 2000) which he
co-edited with E. R. Seary and W. J. Kirwin.
Dr. Helen Peters
is a retired member of the Department of English at Memorial
University and is the niece of DNE editor Dr. George Story. Much of her graduate research was
in the discipline of editing texts. Shortly after her appointment at Memorial she became involved
with members of CODCO editing The Plays of CODCO (1992) and a volume of ten collectivelywritten Newfoundland and Labrador plays, Stars in the Sky Morning (1996). She has written
about Newfoundland and Labrador literature and theatre and served on the executives of WANL,
RCA, ACI, Random Passage Film Set Trust, Wonderbolt Productions (current), on national
(ACTR) and international (IFTR) executives for theatre research, and on the editorial committee
of The Newfoundland Quarterly.
Dr. John Widdowson, folklorist and linguist, was born in Sheffield, England,
and educated at Oxford University, the University of Leeds, and Memorial University, where he
earned his Ph.D. Dr. Widdowson came to Memorial in the 1960s to teach English language and
complete his doctoral studies. He later joined the Folklore department, as Visiting Professor in
1974-75 and serving as head in 1977-78.
Along with Drs. George Story and William Kirwin, Dr. Widdowson was co-editor of the
Dictionary of Newfoundland English, and, with Gerald Thomas, edited Studies in Newfoundland
Folklore: Community and Process.
Dr. Widdowson was founding director of the Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language
at the University of Sheffield, and in 1985 was named honorary research associate in folklore
and language at Memorial University. He is also founding editor of the journal Lore and
Language, and co-director of the Institute for Folklore Studies in Britain and Canada.
His publications include If You Don't be Good...: Verbal Social Control in Newfoundland (1977),
Studies in Linguistic Geography: the Dialects of England in Britain and Ireland (1985) and
Word Maps: A Dialect Atlas of England (1987).
Dr. Widdowson received an honorary doctor of letters degree from Memorial in 2000.
Dr. Sheila Lynch came to Memorial University in the 1960s to study Biology and
then psychiatric medicine. Dr. Lynch worked closely with E. R. Seary in the 1970s as one of his
research assistants. She was named, along with Dr. William Kirwin, as a collaborator on Seary’s
publication Family Names of the Island of Newfoundland (1998) and Place Names of the Avalon
Peninsula. She is now full time faculty at Memorial’s Medical School as well as Clinical
Assistant Professor and Staff Forensic Psychiatrist at the Waterford Hospital.
Dr. John Hewson,
raised in England, is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at
Memorial University. After teaching at Bishop Field, he joined Memorial’s French Department
and in 1968 he founded the Linguistics Department at Memorial, serving as its Head for over 15
years. A distinguished researcher, Dr. Hewson has published extensively on a wide range of
areas in language and linguistics, from general and cognitive linguistics to French, Romance
languages and Algonquian (including Newfoundland Mi’kmaq). During his career at Memorial
he received many accolades, including appointment as both Henrietta Harvey Professor and
University Research Professor. In 1997 he was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada.
Dr. Gordon Jones is a recently retired professor of English, who has been a friend
and colleague of Dr. William Kirwin since 1964. Originally appointed to teach History of the
English Language, he now specializes in Shakespeare and theatre reviewing.
Dr. Harold Paddock, born in Beaumont on Long Island, Notre Dame Bay, retired
in 2002 after thirty years teaching in the Linguistics Department at Memorial University. His
research interests include Newfoundland dialects, acoustic phonetics, and early history of IndoEuropean languages. His publications include A Dialect Study of Carbonear (published by the
American Dialect Society, 1981), and his 1982 Languages in Newfoundland and Labrador, 2nd
ed. He has done fieldwork in the Wessex area of southwestern England, in Guernsey and Jersey
and is a published poet in both standard English and local dialects.