Dictionaries. Holy Communion. Rats.
OK, OK. When I wrote in the previous post that "embracing is something only orthodontists do", it was actually intended as a joke. Not a very good joke, but a joke, i.e., not serious. I have no desire to rewrite the dictionary definition for that particular entry. Or any entry at all, for that matter. Not even those entries, like the one for "feminism" in some popular dictionaries, that appear to me to be at odds with contemporary usage, and therefore, I suppose you could say, "wrong", or at least misleading (I'm referring to the fact that many dictionaries define feminism in terms of a belief in gender equality, a perception which becomes pretty difficult to defend when you look at what the most vociferous Western feminists actually say and do). And yes, my lack of any desire to rewrite any dictionaries can safely be attributed to the fact that I am not employed as a lexicographer. If you paid me to edit dictionaries, then OK, I'd edit them. And if I did so, no doubt I'd do what all lexicographers are supposed to do, which is to use a corpus or multiple corpora to gain insight into contemporary usage and attempt to reflect that as faithfully as possible in my definitions and my examples. As, presumably, the Oxford Dictionary did with the following:
rabid adj. having or proceeding from an extreme or fanatical support of or belief in something: a rabid feminist.
As was widely reported at the time (someone even came up with "Dictionarygate"), this example phrase managed to create a brief, and very silly, controversy when it was jumped on by a Twitter user by the name of Michael Oman-Reagan:
Hey @OxfordWords, why is “rabid feminist” the usage example of “rabid” in your dictionary - maybe change that?
Now, if we bite our lip and ignore the brash, somewhat rude arrogance displayed by the writer and focus on the actual question, it would seem to have a pretty simple answer. Whereas, in the past, the harmless drudgery of the lexicographer included the task of dredging up, presumably from memory in many cases, examples to illustrate the usage of words, that task was revolutionized with the arrival of database technology and large scale digital storage media, and with them, the possibility of amassing databases, known as corpora (singular corpus) containing examples of real language culled from a vast array of representative samples of contemporary usage, both spoken and written. Nowadays, as far as I know, all serious dictionaries avail themselves of this technology, which means that usage examples are not, if they ever were, spirited up by rows of crusty old men in half-moon glasses crouching in Dickensian basements: instead, they are picked from the listed results of an automated database search, I would guess by a human operator (this may have changed as the algorithms get smarter) who will probably have been instructed to choose the most common collocations, excepting issues of clarity which might counsel second-most-common or third-most-common in special cases.
Now, since "rabid" is one of those adjectives which are almost always used attributively rather than predicatively (you would not expect to encounter "she was tall, dark and rabid"), finding a valid usage example for this meaning is as simple as querying the database to return examples of "rabid" followed by the next noun phrase, ordered by frequency such that the most common combinations appear first. And my guess is that it was just such an innocent query that returned "rabid feminist" (Google gives me over 25,000 hits on that, in quotes: granted, Google Search is not a corpus and shouldn't be used as such), followed in short order by "rabid conservative" (6000+ Google hits) and maybe "rabid gun rights advocate" (only 7 hits?), inter alia. So, to answer Mr Oman-Reagan's question, "rabid feminist" is the usage example, quite rightly, for the simple reason that it's something that people say fairly often (and which can moreover be understood quite easily) and the corpus searches duly reflect that. Certainly oftener than "rabid sexist", which is a collocation I've never come across IRL and never expect to (Google offers 878 hits, but in many top hits, "sexist" is another attributive adjective rather than a noun, which wouldn't count), though no doubt it would warm the cockles of Mr Oman-Reagan's heart were it to be substituted for the original.
Now, I mention all this, even though it's not exactly new news, because it comes to mind as an example of a line of thinking in politics which worries me greatly, partly because I now live in a third world country where it has become official government policy - and while I do not expect to be alive much longer, I have a son who is supposed to outlive me, one hopes by threescore years and ten or thereabouts, and who will very possibly have to put up with this kind of thing for a lot longer than I will. The line of thinking in question can be summed up as follows: people are stupid, and tend to uncritically accept what they see and hear, so it becomes the duty of us superior, enlightened thinkers to control and filter what those stupid people get to see and hear, for (presumably) their own good, or that of "society". Honestly, I can't see any other possible reason for Mr Oman-Reagan's suggestion to "maybe change that", other than that he is worried that ignorant, gullible individuals might see that example and draw the (erroneous?) conclusion that "rabid feminist" is a thing, or that feminists tend oftentimes to be rabid. A subsidiary question would then be: why should that worry him? - given that the definition of "rabid" in the entry is quite explicit, referencing "extreme or fanatical support of or belief in": will Mr Oman-Reagan claim that no feminist is extreme or fanatical, or that if she is, we shouldn't say so?
I suppose I ought to mention that in the original Twitter exchange, the casual arrogance of the original request to "maybe change that" was defended by one writer who went so far as to disinter ye olde Etymological Fallacy, thusly:
@OxfordWords are you seriously claiming the word “rabid”, with origins in madness & violence, “isn’t necessarily” negative?
Oh, dear. It would seem that Brooke Simmons hasn't caught on to the fact that words change their meaning over time, and that the "origins" of a word, while often interesting and enlightening, cannot be used as a guide to contemporary denotation or connotation, else we would have to conclude from the above that Ms Simmons is truly a nice person (nice, fr, L. nescius, ignorant, via old Fr.).In point of fact, a Google search for "rabid feminist" offers as its second hit, directly after the article I'm quoting, a Facebook page, entitled Rabid Feminist, self-described as "for enraged feminists who support Hillary Clinton for President". So "rabid", then, is "necessarily" negative unless you support Hillary, in which case it isn't? Is that it? But this whole line of argument is a red herring, since even if we were to concede that "rabid" is "necessarily negative" in connotation, it does not follow that the use of "rabid feminist" is a slur on feminists in general, any more than, say, "corrupt politician" implies a criticism of all politicians: on the contrary, the usage implies that, just as there is a subset of politicians who are corrupt, and hence, presumably, a further subset of those who aren't, likewise some feminists may be rabid while others, presumably, are not. This leads me to wonder, seriously, whether Mr Oman-Reagan and Ms Simmons wish to condemn all usages which hint at even the faintest possibility that an individual feminist may occasionally be anything other than a paragon of virtue or an angel of light. Not being a Twitter user (I closed my account when Twitter turned into a one-party state, with none other than Anita Sarkeesian among its unelected panel of Thought Police) I haven't had the chance to quiz them on this, so instead I'm going to try to predict their reply to the above, which I suspect would go roughly as follows:
"No, I don't think all feminists are perfect. But a dictionary is supposed to tell you how to use words correctly. When people see an example like that, they think it's OK to perpetuate the stereotype of feminists as extreme and fanatical."
I've been careful to include in this imaginary riposte three specific arguments I've heard frequently in similar contexts. One, that dictionaries are, or should be, prescriptive. Two, that we have a duty to avoid "perpetuating stereotypes", especially negative ones, and especially those that negatively depict whichever groups currently enjoy the status of Officially Oppressed. And three, that there is something right and proper about trying to control what other people get to see, hear or read, based on concerns about what they might think or how they might act in consequence.
There's an additional argument, but it's normally trotted out as a last resort by the desperate. That one is "what about the Children?" Or in this case, "Yes, but children use those dictionaries too!" I'll try to deal with each argument in turn (n.b. "deal with" here does not mean "refute" or "definitively settle" - I'm not that egolatrous. All I wish to do is point out that there is another legitimate and logically defensible way of looking at these things).
First: if you want a prescriptive dictionary, i.e. one which tells you how you should use words, rather than how people actually do use words, you could do worse than make French or Spanish your first language, since both languages (and possibly several others, for aught I know) have an official Academy which presumes to lay down rules about "correct" usage, and publishes its own dictionary. English has never had that sort of a body. There is no official Academy for English, nor is there an "official" dictionary, although some dictionaries have enjoyed greater prestige than others. The worldwide success of English up to the present day would seem to confirm that it is possible for a language to survive and flourish and adapt to new challenges without any centralized, normative governing body setting the rules (anarchists and libertarians take note). In fact, there are many reasons to prefer such an arrangement: not the least of which is that if no one ever broke the rules, in the sense of using words which weren't in the dictionary, or giving existing words new meanings or new pronunciations which weren't listed by the same source, we would all presumably still be talking like Dr Johnson, with his permitted vocabulary of 40,000 words, rather than just over a million. Among the words which would have been lost to us had English been cursed since the time of Johnson with the sort of lexical Stasi that pedants have always panted after is, of course, the word "feminism", first used in English in the 1890s, and added to dictionaries some time later. Food for thought, one would have supposed.
So no, in English at least, dictionaries aren't "supposed to tell you how to use words correctly". And a good thing too. Instead, they aim to tell you how sizeable numbers of other people are currently using words. Armed with this information, you are then free to decide whether to blend in with those other people, using the same words they do in the same pat, unoriginal phrases, with the same tribal connotations, or to take risks with language (the greatest risk being that of not being understood). An example may make this clearer:
In Spanish the word bizarro has traditionally been listed as meaning something like brave or valiant. The last time I looked, which was a few months ago, the "official" dictionary of the Real Academia de la Lengua listed that meaning and only that meaning. However, I think I am right in saying that hardly anyone has used the word in that sense for over a century (let's face it, valiant people are not exactly two a penny at the best of times): at least, it's one of those "literary" words which writers use to show off, and expect their readers to have to turn to the dictionary to clarify the sense of. This was until an unknown critical mass of writers (or translators?) in Spanish began to associate the word with the English word "bizarre", which of course has quite a different meaning. Suddenly, examples began to pop up all over the place of "bizarro" used in Spanish with the clear, unequivocal meaning of "weird", by analogy with English. As you might expect, this drew howls of anguish from the pedants. Letters were written. Dismissive tweets were tweeted. As far as I know, the argument still continues, though lately the howls have seemed to become more muted. Well, here's the thing: I would happily bet my house on the definition of "bizarro" being updated, eventually, in the Academy dictionary along with all the others, if it hasn't been already (I'm too lazy to look right now), to include the new meaning. The People have spoken: and their verdict, I think quite rightly in this case, is that a novel, imported but genuinely useful and readily understood definition is at least as valid as an old-fashioned one that no one seemed to find a use for.
It is just such carefree misbehaviour that makes a language grow and develop. I'm no fan of "irregardless", or "I could care less", but if someone uses those words with a contextually unequivocal sense, you won't see me complaining or presuming to "correct" the perpetrator, because whether we like it or not, these are now legitimate and fairly widespread usages, and part of being grown up is recognizing that people are not bound to conform to our own personal aesthetic or moral standards or reactionary foibles, even if they happen to have the support of a dictionary. So there.
Second argument: stereotypes. Of course, these exist. Of course, some of them are intensely annoying. And no, I don't agree with the view, which I've often heard expressed, that stereotypes always contain a grain of truth "otherwise they would never have come about". This has been shown to be false by any number of studies, let alone by elementary common sense. Perhaps the best thing that can be said about stereotypes is that they're a boon to lazy sitcom writers, particularly here in South America. So far, so good: we're all against stereotypes, then. Where we differ is on what to do about them. In my own case, as a teacher, what I do is try to teach my students elementary critical thinking skills, and make it known to them that an unqualified generalization for which a single counterexample can be found is demonstrably untrue, and hence worthless. That's my contribution, and I think it's a fair one. Where I'm less than happy is with the notion that anything that appears to owe its existence to a stereotype needs to be "challenged", lest the stereotype in question be "reinforced". First, because this whole vocabulary of "reinforcement" rests on Skinnerian behaviourist postulates, and I'm not sure how anyone can take Skinner seriously after Chomsky took him memorably to the cleaners back in '59. Second, because it's profoundly elitist and paternalistic. It assumes that there is a class of people who need to be protected from certain things in their environment, and another class of people who are qualified to do the protecting, i.e. to make decisions about what people from the first group should and shouldn't see. I know that there are studies that show that stereotyping can negatively affect a person's self-esteem, I get that, but this argument ignores the rather obvious fact that in the typical day of the typical person, a thousand other things happen that also have the same effect of damaging our self-esteem. Would you protect the poor benighted masses from all those things as well? Isn't it more sensible, more practical and above all more liberal, to just let people figure out their own self-protection mechanisms as they go through life, and offer what help we can as individuals in enabling that process? And who made you the Thought Police of the majority of the population anyway?
This last argument, by the way, is equally applicable to children as it is to adults. As a parent myself, I am of course aware of my responsibility to try to ensure my child grows up in a happy and healthy environment: hence, to exercise a degree of control over what influences he is exposed to. That is my responsibility: it is not the State's, nor is it that of any other individual, however well-intentioned. To pretend to usurp the role of the parents in deciding what it is and isn't appropriate for other people's kids to see is, in any rational world, the summit of dictatorial obnoxiousness. When governments do it just as much as anyone else.
I just used the word "responsibility" twice in a paragraph. It brings me, though I'd rather it didn't, to a possible weakness in my own argument. I have said I don't like stereotypes, and implied that I personally will go out of my way to avoid having recourse to them, for example in any creative writing I may do. I have, you might say, a moderately well developed sense of responsibility in such things. The question then arises: if I censor myself, why shouldn't I censor other people in exactly the same way? Why is what's de rigueur for me not (or not necessarily) so for others? The response, obviously, has to rest on a notion of individual freedom which for me is a necessary prior assumption that guides a lot of my thinking. I don't know if I can defend it philosophically (though I intend to try, later on, when I'm over this flu), but to me, it's fundamental: individual freedom is the highest human value. If you agree with that, at least, then it follows that if I censor myself, I am exercising my own freedom, whereas if I censor you, I am depriving you of yours. There's the crucial difference. OK, you might say, but simply suggesting to a person that he or she do something differently is not depriving them of their freedom to decide. True enough. Why, then, make such a monumental fuss about a single tweet containing a simple suggestion? I've already sketched in an answer above (it's not the tweet, it's the underlying politics, which I see everywhere), but if I am honest I have to admit that part of this is just personality. I am a lifelong social phobic, hence have very undeveloped social skills. I am not all that good at making polite, friendly suggestions in such a way that they gain a positive response. On many occasions I have tried to be friendly and constructive, and somehow managed to come across as a supercilious, arrogant git. Perhaps this explains why I am so ready to see supercilious, arrogant gittishness in e.g. Mr Oman-Reagan's original tweet. Perhaps I am doing him an injustice. Only he can settle that. If anyone reading this has a Twitter account, feel free to quiz him on this topic: "Are you or are you not a supercilious, arrogant git, Mr Oman-Reagan? Enquiring minds want to know" and let me know the definitive answer so I can adjust my perceptions, and perhaps this article, accordingly.
Another way of saying this is that I don't hold other people to the same standards as I hold myself, and I don't see this as much of a problem, provided the standards I hold for myself are less permissive than those I apply to others, as, being those of an ex Catholic, they generally are (I can't rule out the odd blind spot. Can anyone?)
Last argument: censorship, controlling what other people are allowed to see and hear. Well, I think I've already covered that. Ok, so since I'm tired, feverish and distressingly snotty, I'll leave it there for now... or rather I'll fade out slowly with a few other examples of arrogant Twittery gittishness, from the same article referenced above, for your entertainment:
@OxfordWords @KatrinaLatham Oxford, you could not be more wrong [about "rabid" being "not necessarily negative"]. Check some other dictionaries if you don't think so. Apologize or resign.
(my emphasis) This tweeter, one Cheryl Stephens, apparently finds it conceivable that someone who has landed a rather nice job involving management of an online dictionary's twitter presence will, at the request of a random social media user, voluntarily resign from said job over a footling little disagreement regarding the connotations of an adjective, rather than offer an insincere apology. I am tempted to deduce, speculatively, that Ms Stephens has never had the experience of depending on a monthly salary to pay bills, but I might be wrong about that. She might just be a twat. Or she may have been writing this at gunpoint, under the dictation of a hooded Liechtensteinian terrorist. Your guess is as good as mine.
@OxfordWords @KatrinaLatham This is embarrassing. You are a dictionary & you're deliberately misrepresenting words to defend your sexism.
"This is embarrassing" followed immediately by "You are a dictionary". I love it when that sort of thing happens. (H/T "copycat")
It’s depressing to think that ... some readers might take these sexist usage examples as definitive ... Obviously it’s impossible for lexicographers to keep their opinions totally separate from their work, but, at least without having more details on how Oxford selects their usage examples, I’m not entirely convinced that this misogyny is Oxford’s fault
Sad to note that this is taken from an alleged "culture blog". You'd think they'd be a bit more careful with words. Still, I'll leave the "misogyny" epidemic for another time. It deserves an article of its own.
Oh, and why "Holy Communion" and "Rats". Simple: I planned a longer post, which would have delved into Skinnerian behaviourism a bit more (hence "rats") and also explained more patiently to the reader than I now feel able to, how and why the elitist, authoritarian view of the world purveyed by the likes of Mr Oman-Reagan has managed to result in a draconian Communication Law and consequent outbreak of heavy-handed government censorship in the country where I currently reside. Like I say, I have the flu, or something like it anyway. Great gobbets of snot. Constant coughing. Fever. Mild diarrhoea. Is this too much for you already?
rabid adj. having or proceeding from an extreme or fanatical support of or belief in something: a rabid feminist.
As was widely reported at the time (someone even came up with "Dictionarygate"), this example phrase managed to create a brief, and very silly, controversy when it was jumped on by a Twitter user by the name of Michael Oman-Reagan:
Hey @OxfordWords, why is “rabid feminist” the usage example of “rabid” in your dictionary - maybe change that?
Now, if we bite our lip and ignore the brash, somewhat rude arrogance displayed by the writer and focus on the actual question, it would seem to have a pretty simple answer. Whereas, in the past, the harmless drudgery of the lexicographer included the task of dredging up, presumably from memory in many cases, examples to illustrate the usage of words, that task was revolutionized with the arrival of database technology and large scale digital storage media, and with them, the possibility of amassing databases, known as corpora (singular corpus) containing examples of real language culled from a vast array of representative samples of contemporary usage, both spoken and written. Nowadays, as far as I know, all serious dictionaries avail themselves of this technology, which means that usage examples are not, if they ever were, spirited up by rows of crusty old men in half-moon glasses crouching in Dickensian basements: instead, they are picked from the listed results of an automated database search, I would guess by a human operator (this may have changed as the algorithms get smarter) who will probably have been instructed to choose the most common collocations, excepting issues of clarity which might counsel second-most-common or third-most-common in special cases.
Now, since "rabid" is one of those adjectives which are almost always used attributively rather than predicatively (you would not expect to encounter "she was tall, dark and rabid"), finding a valid usage example for this meaning is as simple as querying the database to return examples of "rabid" followed by the next noun phrase, ordered by frequency such that the most common combinations appear first. And my guess is that it was just such an innocent query that returned "rabid feminist" (Google gives me over 25,000 hits on that, in quotes: granted, Google Search is not a corpus and shouldn't be used as such), followed in short order by "rabid conservative" (6000+ Google hits) and maybe "rabid gun rights advocate" (only 7 hits?), inter alia. So, to answer Mr Oman-Reagan's question, "rabid feminist" is the usage example, quite rightly, for the simple reason that it's something that people say fairly often (and which can moreover be understood quite easily) and the corpus searches duly reflect that. Certainly oftener than "rabid sexist", which is a collocation I've never come across IRL and never expect to (Google offers 878 hits, but in many top hits, "sexist" is another attributive adjective rather than a noun, which wouldn't count), though no doubt it would warm the cockles of Mr Oman-Reagan's heart were it to be substituted for the original.
Now, I mention all this, even though it's not exactly new news, because it comes to mind as an example of a line of thinking in politics which worries me greatly, partly because I now live in a third world country where it has become official government policy - and while I do not expect to be alive much longer, I have a son who is supposed to outlive me, one hopes by threescore years and ten or thereabouts, and who will very possibly have to put up with this kind of thing for a lot longer than I will. The line of thinking in question can be summed up as follows: people are stupid, and tend to uncritically accept what they see and hear, so it becomes the duty of us superior, enlightened thinkers to control and filter what those stupid people get to see and hear, for (presumably) their own good, or that of "society". Honestly, I can't see any other possible reason for Mr Oman-Reagan's suggestion to "maybe change that", other than that he is worried that ignorant, gullible individuals might see that example and draw the (erroneous?) conclusion that "rabid feminist" is a thing, or that feminists tend oftentimes to be rabid. A subsidiary question would then be: why should that worry him? - given that the definition of "rabid" in the entry is quite explicit, referencing "extreme or fanatical support of or belief in": will Mr Oman-Reagan claim that no feminist is extreme or fanatical, or that if she is, we shouldn't say so?
I suppose I ought to mention that in the original Twitter exchange, the casual arrogance of the original request to "maybe change that" was defended by one writer who went so far as to disinter ye olde Etymological Fallacy, thusly:
@OxfordWords are you seriously claiming the word “rabid”, with origins in madness & violence, “isn’t necessarily” negative?
Oh, dear. It would seem that Brooke Simmons hasn't caught on to the fact that words change their meaning over time, and that the "origins" of a word, while often interesting and enlightening, cannot be used as a guide to contemporary denotation or connotation, else we would have to conclude from the above that Ms Simmons is truly a nice person (nice, fr, L. nescius, ignorant, via old Fr.).In point of fact, a Google search for "rabid feminist" offers as its second hit, directly after the article I'm quoting, a Facebook page, entitled Rabid Feminist, self-described as "for enraged feminists who support Hillary Clinton for President". So "rabid", then, is "necessarily" negative unless you support Hillary, in which case it isn't? Is that it? But this whole line of argument is a red herring, since even if we were to concede that "rabid" is "necessarily negative" in connotation, it does not follow that the use of "rabid feminist" is a slur on feminists in general, any more than, say, "corrupt politician" implies a criticism of all politicians: on the contrary, the usage implies that, just as there is a subset of politicians who are corrupt, and hence, presumably, a further subset of those who aren't, likewise some feminists may be rabid while others, presumably, are not. This leads me to wonder, seriously, whether Mr Oman-Reagan and Ms Simmons wish to condemn all usages which hint at even the faintest possibility that an individual feminist may occasionally be anything other than a paragon of virtue or an angel of light. Not being a Twitter user (I closed my account when Twitter turned into a one-party state, with none other than Anita Sarkeesian among its unelected panel of Thought Police) I haven't had the chance to quiz them on this, so instead I'm going to try to predict their reply to the above, which I suspect would go roughly as follows:
"No, I don't think all feminists are perfect. But a dictionary is supposed to tell you how to use words correctly. When people see an example like that, they think it's OK to perpetuate the stereotype of feminists as extreme and fanatical."
I've been careful to include in this imaginary riposte three specific arguments I've heard frequently in similar contexts. One, that dictionaries are, or should be, prescriptive. Two, that we have a duty to avoid "perpetuating stereotypes", especially negative ones, and especially those that negatively depict whichever groups currently enjoy the status of Officially Oppressed. And three, that there is something right and proper about trying to control what other people get to see, hear or read, based on concerns about what they might think or how they might act in consequence.
There's an additional argument, but it's normally trotted out as a last resort by the desperate. That one is "what about the Children?" Or in this case, "Yes, but children use those dictionaries too!" I'll try to deal with each argument in turn (n.b. "deal with" here does not mean "refute" or "definitively settle" - I'm not that egolatrous. All I wish to do is point out that there is another legitimate and logically defensible way of looking at these things).
First: if you want a prescriptive dictionary, i.e. one which tells you how you should use words, rather than how people actually do use words, you could do worse than make French or Spanish your first language, since both languages (and possibly several others, for aught I know) have an official Academy which presumes to lay down rules about "correct" usage, and publishes its own dictionary. English has never had that sort of a body. There is no official Academy for English, nor is there an "official" dictionary, although some dictionaries have enjoyed greater prestige than others. The worldwide success of English up to the present day would seem to confirm that it is possible for a language to survive and flourish and adapt to new challenges without any centralized, normative governing body setting the rules (anarchists and libertarians take note). In fact, there are many reasons to prefer such an arrangement: not the least of which is that if no one ever broke the rules, in the sense of using words which weren't in the dictionary, or giving existing words new meanings or new pronunciations which weren't listed by the same source, we would all presumably still be talking like Dr Johnson, with his permitted vocabulary of 40,000 words, rather than just over a million. Among the words which would have been lost to us had English been cursed since the time of Johnson with the sort of lexical Stasi that pedants have always panted after is, of course, the word "feminism", first used in English in the 1890s, and added to dictionaries some time later. Food for thought, one would have supposed.
So no, in English at least, dictionaries aren't "supposed to tell you how to use words correctly". And a good thing too. Instead, they aim to tell you how sizeable numbers of other people are currently using words. Armed with this information, you are then free to decide whether to blend in with those other people, using the same words they do in the same pat, unoriginal phrases, with the same tribal connotations, or to take risks with language (the greatest risk being that of not being understood). An example may make this clearer:
In Spanish the word bizarro has traditionally been listed as meaning something like brave or valiant. The last time I looked, which was a few months ago, the "official" dictionary of the Real Academia de la Lengua listed that meaning and only that meaning. However, I think I am right in saying that hardly anyone has used the word in that sense for over a century (let's face it, valiant people are not exactly two a penny at the best of times): at least, it's one of those "literary" words which writers use to show off, and expect their readers to have to turn to the dictionary to clarify the sense of. This was until an unknown critical mass of writers (or translators?) in Spanish began to associate the word with the English word "bizarre", which of course has quite a different meaning. Suddenly, examples began to pop up all over the place of "bizarro" used in Spanish with the clear, unequivocal meaning of "weird", by analogy with English. As you might expect, this drew howls of anguish from the pedants. Letters were written. Dismissive tweets were tweeted. As far as I know, the argument still continues, though lately the howls have seemed to become more muted. Well, here's the thing: I would happily bet my house on the definition of "bizarro" being updated, eventually, in the Academy dictionary along with all the others, if it hasn't been already (I'm too lazy to look right now), to include the new meaning. The People have spoken: and their verdict, I think quite rightly in this case, is that a novel, imported but genuinely useful and readily understood definition is at least as valid as an old-fashioned one that no one seemed to find a use for.
It is just such carefree misbehaviour that makes a language grow and develop. I'm no fan of "irregardless", or "I could care less", but if someone uses those words with a contextually unequivocal sense, you won't see me complaining or presuming to "correct" the perpetrator, because whether we like it or not, these are now legitimate and fairly widespread usages, and part of being grown up is recognizing that people are not bound to conform to our own personal aesthetic or moral standards or reactionary foibles, even if they happen to have the support of a dictionary. So there.
Second argument: stereotypes. Of course, these exist. Of course, some of them are intensely annoying. And no, I don't agree with the view, which I've often heard expressed, that stereotypes always contain a grain of truth "otherwise they would never have come about". This has been shown to be false by any number of studies, let alone by elementary common sense. Perhaps the best thing that can be said about stereotypes is that they're a boon to lazy sitcom writers, particularly here in South America. So far, so good: we're all against stereotypes, then. Where we differ is on what to do about them. In my own case, as a teacher, what I do is try to teach my students elementary critical thinking skills, and make it known to them that an unqualified generalization for which a single counterexample can be found is demonstrably untrue, and hence worthless. That's my contribution, and I think it's a fair one. Where I'm less than happy is with the notion that anything that appears to owe its existence to a stereotype needs to be "challenged", lest the stereotype in question be "reinforced". First, because this whole vocabulary of "reinforcement" rests on Skinnerian behaviourist postulates, and I'm not sure how anyone can take Skinner seriously after Chomsky took him memorably to the cleaners back in '59. Second, because it's profoundly elitist and paternalistic. It assumes that there is a class of people who need to be protected from certain things in their environment, and another class of people who are qualified to do the protecting, i.e. to make decisions about what people from the first group should and shouldn't see. I know that there are studies that show that stereotyping can negatively affect a person's self-esteem, I get that, but this argument ignores the rather obvious fact that in the typical day of the typical person, a thousand other things happen that also have the same effect of damaging our self-esteem. Would you protect the poor benighted masses from all those things as well? Isn't it more sensible, more practical and above all more liberal, to just let people figure out their own self-protection mechanisms as they go through life, and offer what help we can as individuals in enabling that process? And who made you the Thought Police of the majority of the population anyway?
This last argument, by the way, is equally applicable to children as it is to adults. As a parent myself, I am of course aware of my responsibility to try to ensure my child grows up in a happy and healthy environment: hence, to exercise a degree of control over what influences he is exposed to. That is my responsibility: it is not the State's, nor is it that of any other individual, however well-intentioned. To pretend to usurp the role of the parents in deciding what it is and isn't appropriate for other people's kids to see is, in any rational world, the summit of dictatorial obnoxiousness. When governments do it just as much as anyone else.
I just used the word "responsibility" twice in a paragraph. It brings me, though I'd rather it didn't, to a possible weakness in my own argument. I have said I don't like stereotypes, and implied that I personally will go out of my way to avoid having recourse to them, for example in any creative writing I may do. I have, you might say, a moderately well developed sense of responsibility in such things. The question then arises: if I censor myself, why shouldn't I censor other people in exactly the same way? Why is what's de rigueur for me not (or not necessarily) so for others? The response, obviously, has to rest on a notion of individual freedom which for me is a necessary prior assumption that guides a lot of my thinking. I don't know if I can defend it philosophically (though I intend to try, later on, when I'm over this flu), but to me, it's fundamental: individual freedom is the highest human value. If you agree with that, at least, then it follows that if I censor myself, I am exercising my own freedom, whereas if I censor you, I am depriving you of yours. There's the crucial difference. OK, you might say, but simply suggesting to a person that he or she do something differently is not depriving them of their freedom to decide. True enough. Why, then, make such a monumental fuss about a single tweet containing a simple suggestion? I've already sketched in an answer above (it's not the tweet, it's the underlying politics, which I see everywhere), but if I am honest I have to admit that part of this is just personality. I am a lifelong social phobic, hence have very undeveloped social skills. I am not all that good at making polite, friendly suggestions in such a way that they gain a positive response. On many occasions I have tried to be friendly and constructive, and somehow managed to come across as a supercilious, arrogant git. Perhaps this explains why I am so ready to see supercilious, arrogant gittishness in e.g. Mr Oman-Reagan's original tweet. Perhaps I am doing him an injustice. Only he can settle that. If anyone reading this has a Twitter account, feel free to quiz him on this topic: "Are you or are you not a supercilious, arrogant git, Mr Oman-Reagan? Enquiring minds want to know" and let me know the definitive answer so I can adjust my perceptions, and perhaps this article, accordingly.
Another way of saying this is that I don't hold other people to the same standards as I hold myself, and I don't see this as much of a problem, provided the standards I hold for myself are less permissive than those I apply to others, as, being those of an ex Catholic, they generally are (I can't rule out the odd blind spot. Can anyone?)
Last argument: censorship, controlling what other people are allowed to see and hear. Well, I think I've already covered that. Ok, so since I'm tired, feverish and distressingly snotty, I'll leave it there for now... or rather I'll fade out slowly with a few other examples of arrogant Twittery gittishness, from the same article referenced above, for your entertainment:
@OxfordWords @KatrinaLatham Oxford, you could not be more wrong [about "rabid" being "not necessarily negative"]. Check some other dictionaries if you don't think so. Apologize or resign.
(my emphasis) This tweeter, one Cheryl Stephens, apparently finds it conceivable that someone who has landed a rather nice job involving management of an online dictionary's twitter presence will, at the request of a random social media user, voluntarily resign from said job over a footling little disagreement regarding the connotations of an adjective, rather than offer an insincere apology. I am tempted to deduce, speculatively, that Ms Stephens has never had the experience of depending on a monthly salary to pay bills, but I might be wrong about that. She might just be a twat. Or she may have been writing this at gunpoint, under the dictation of a hooded Liechtensteinian terrorist. Your guess is as good as mine.
@OxfordWords @KatrinaLatham This is embarrassing. You are a dictionary & you're deliberately misrepresenting words to defend your sexism.
"This is embarrassing" followed immediately by "You are a dictionary". I love it when that sort of thing happens. (H/T "copycat")
It’s depressing to think that ... some readers might take these sexist usage examples as definitive ... Obviously it’s impossible for lexicographers to keep their opinions totally separate from their work, but, at least without having more details on how Oxford selects their usage examples, I’m not entirely convinced that this misogyny is Oxford’s fault
Sad to note that this is taken from an alleged "culture blog". You'd think they'd be a bit more careful with words. Still, I'll leave the "misogyny" epidemic for another time. It deserves an article of its own.
Oh, and why "Holy Communion" and "Rats". Simple: I planned a longer post, which would have delved into Skinnerian behaviourism a bit more (hence "rats") and also explained more patiently to the reader than I now feel able to, how and why the elitist, authoritarian view of the world purveyed by the likes of Mr Oman-Reagan has managed to result in a draconian Communication Law and consequent outbreak of heavy-handed government censorship in the country where I currently reside. Like I say, I have the flu, or something like it anyway. Great gobbets of snot. Constant coughing. Fever. Mild diarrhoea. Is this too much for you already?
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