The Decline of the Dictionary

[Billionbridges.com]

As a working translator as well, I agree with Scott. I
may wish to whinge about how much slang has been
included in a source language document, making translation
of certain passages difficult, but my clients would not find
my complaints about linguistic "degeneration" very interesting
or useful.

They just want me to put it into a roughly equivalent register of
English so that they can see what it _means_.

One more thing: If nobody uses "far-out" anymore, or if "dis"
doesn't last in popular usage past the end of 2004, well, so
what? To state the bleedin' obvious, there are those of us
who are interested in, and indeed may have an imperative
to learn about, archaic forms.

Forsooth, does Mr. Fiske object that I am able to look up
"forsooth" in the dictionary?

Don

> 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.
>