The Decline of the Dictionary

[Scott Sadowsky]

On 8/9/2003 08:33 AM, Robert Hartwell Fiske wrote the following:

You guys can kick me for taking the troll bait and I won't feel the least
bit offended, but I wanted to respond to a couple of this article's points
with some practical thoughts.


>"Laxicographers" all, the Merriam-Webster staff remind us that
>dictionaries merely record how people use the language, not necessarily
>how it ought to be used. Some dictionaries, and certainly this new
>Merriam-Webster, actually promote illiteracy.... the marketing strategy of
>including swear words....

These kinds of comments can only come from someone who doesn't actually
have a real-world use for dictionaries, seeing them instead as some sort of
fetish to be caressed during times of emotional need.

As someone who makes part of his living as a translator, I thank my lucky
stars for the English-speaking world's descriptivist lexicography.  When I
run across something in English that I don't understand, I want to know
what it means, not whether the schoolmarm brigade considers it
"proper".  When translating into English something containing swear words,
by God, I wan't to find a good equivalent for the thing, just vulgar enough
without going over, hopefully referring to the same body
part/excretion/activity, and that would be rather tough if our guardian
prescriptivists had their way in excluding these words from the dictionary.

Unfortunately, the other side of the coin --the Spanish-speaking world-- is
quite a different matter.  Here, the prescriptivists have maintained their
power by any means necessary (suffice it to say that the Royal Academy's
spelling conventions were adopted in Chile only after one of the country's
dictators, in a decree issued shortly after his coup d'etat, ordered the
population to use them).

Hereabouts, dictionaries are in a sorry state thanks to our dear
prescriptivists.  The magnum opus of Spanish-language lexicography, the
Royal Academy's dictionary, is a pathetic little 95,000-word clunker that's
supposed to suffice for 400 million speakers in 25+ countries.  It has
precious little slang, few swear words, only a token amount of what its
European authors consider "localisms"... and it's by far the least useful
dictionary per unit of text on the planet.

Most of the things I want to look up in it either aren't there (of course,
we can never know if that's due to incompetence, oversight, or intentional
exclusion based on prescriptivist criteria) or don't mean what they mean in
my corner of the world (one man's language change is another's
degeneration, even if the change is centuries old).  Quite useless.

Having had to deal with the disastrous results of prescriptivist
lexicography so extensively, I can only thank my lucky stars that this
movement is dying out in the English-speaking world.

Cheers,
Scott