Tuesday
Dec162008
The Oxford Junior Dictionary Furore
Tuesday 16 December, 2008 Once again a bunch of not quite good enoughs are battling against the progression of language. Henry Porter at The Guardian lays in with the ethically bereft idea that anyone knows what's good for language at any given time by criticising the latest changes to the Oxford Junior Dictionary:
...the words that have been culled: catkin, brook, minnow, acorn, buttercup, heron, almond, marzipan, ash, beetroot, bray, bridle, porpoise ...the words that have elbowed them out. They include celebrity, tolerant, vandalism, negotiate, interdependent, creep, citizenship, childhood, conflict, bungee jumping, committee, compulsory, cope, democratic, allergic, biodegradable, emotion, dyslexic, donate, endangered, Euro, square number, block graph, attachment, database and analogue ...what we are witnessing is a gradual triumph of abstract words over objects that can be seen and experienced.God forbid we'd be reading that on a website that features things called 'blogs', a term less than a decade old. And, shock horror, let's not be giving our children terms like tolerant, negotiate, interdependent, democratic, donate and endangered. What kind of thoughts will they think with those heinous, 'abstract' terms floating around their little unfinished brains? Better that they can name a heron, or know what an acorn is when they see one. I know what an acorn is because I went outside. I don't want my children learning what it is to negotatiate, or to be tolerant, I'd rather them be able to identify marzipan rather than simply enjoying its taste and having to describe the flavours to me using, I don't know, words they learnt from the Oxford Junior Dictionary. Andrew Brown, who also works at The Guardian and must have got there before Henry noticed because Henry wrote his article a whole four days after Andrew's, decided that the trend of professional journalists' blogs lacked that piquancy of downright idiocy that now scars most of the not-quite-good-enough-for-the-print-edition output of The Guardian website, and chimed in with this delicious twizzler:
Dictionaries should be many things, but even the smallest should be a gateway into wonder. The child who doesn't even know of the possibility of larks and leopards has been robbed. To offer them instead the grey bureaucratic porridge of the new words is a crime against their humanity.The thing that irks me most about these opinion pieces is their complete lack of regard - no - their complete disrespect for childrens' ability to swap words, phrases and idioms between themselves, to simply pick up language and run with it. By the time most children get to sex education class they've either learned everything there is to learn or are being roundly bullied by their classmates for not knowing it. How does this come about? Through the trade of meanings, the sneaky whispers in corridors and playgrounds where kids tell each other that one day you're going to fancy him or you're going to fancy her and then you'll do it. So what if my kid doesn't know what an acorn is? When I finally have children, if they want to know what an acorn is, I'll tell them. If they don't find out themselves, they most likely won't need that knowledge to get through life. Just because a kid isn't taught from a book what a tree is, it doesn't mean he or she will never be near a tree, or sit against one, and language comes of the social mechanics of our society. The dictionary is at once a fundamental indicator of where we stand as a society and a complete irrelevance because by the time it's published it is already to a great extent outmoded, especially with regards to newly coined terms which are subject to subtle but fundamental changes in meaning. Katy Guest at The Independent adds a dollop of mouldy jam to the three-day old rice pudding, criticising the concept of the online dictionary:
What they don't do is show words side by side. They allow for no browsing.No but on the other hand you could, say, be a few keypresses away from Wicktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikisource, even Urban Dictionary, which contains the kind of instant etymological delineations that the Oxford scholars can only dream of. Sure, the inaccuracies are often overlooked, but language is always decided by the undefined, so those should be celebrated. There are times when language needs to be well defined, such as in legal documents (though you could argue that is where the biggest semantic arguments of all take place) but I'm sure we can trust our lawyers to dig out the OED when needs be. If they're doing their job properly, they shouldn't have to anyway. Also, I can't remember the last time I saw any of my three cousins 'browsing' through a dictionary. Leave the kids alone, let them help shape our language, they know it better than we do because they still remember learning it.