[sw-l] Guidelines for Dictionary Editors ;-)

[Dan Parvaz]

In my experience, people who want to learn the rude signs just for grins
("Look, I can sign 'shit.' Aren't I clever?") learn quickly that if that's
all they can do, the result is a quick trip to Coventry :-) In many ways
it's a self-adjusting system. So when lots of hearing people learned the
ASL sign for "bullshit" by watching "Children of a Lesser God," society
didn't crumble. Deaf people rolled their eyes, and everyone moved on.

A comparable situation exists in spoken langauges. In French class you can
only take so much of the "this is the pen of my aunt" stuff before you
start wondering how to tell someone to, well, stuff it. So little
schoolboys (and girls, but I can't speak from experience there) run to the
unabridged dictionaries and learn a few naughty words. We did the same
thing in Latin, since the English translators -- Victorians, all -- left
all the naughty bits untranslated (so huge swaths of Catullus stayed in
Latin :-). Reading Chaucer, we learned the origins of some of our shorter
words for body parts.

Big deal. Who are we protecting? Does the Deaf community actually need us
to act as linguistic gatekeepers for them? How patronizing does *that*
sound?

And children? You can access many dictionaries online, including American
Heritage and OED. Unexpurgated. I don't think learning the word for
"fellatio" is going to scar kids for life. And if parents are using any
kind of keyword-based net-nanny software, chances are those pages will be
blocked, if that's what the parents want.

Of course we include "useful" signs. I can guarantee that any lexical
entry worth using will be included, and those outnumber the sailor talk by
quite a bit. I think the process of naturally adding signs as we encounter
them will keep the salty language to a very low proportion. But to
bowlderize the dictionary? That goes against my principles.

-Dan.