It’s the bane of many an author these days: those newspaper-filler Q&As. One I recently filled out included the question: ‘What’s the book you’re never without?’ Of course, there’s no book I lug about with me everywhere, but inanity comes with this territory. I responded: ‘A tattered, duct-taped blue hardcover of my Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (based on Webster’s Third) published in 1969.’
Lame? Actually, no. Access to older analogue dictionaries has become politically invaluable.
Pre-internet, august dictionaries such as Webster’s and the OED functioned as linguistic anchors. Beneficially slow to adapt and resistant to vernacular fashion, print editions that were expensive to reissue acted as drags on popular misunderstandings (no, ‘notorious’ does not mean ‘famous’). By calling us to shared agreement on what words did and didn’t mean, hard-copy dictionaries helped facilitate clear, precise communication. But online dictionaries have jettisoned this conservative purpose. Capable of being updated daily, digital definitions change with the wind, and are eternally playing catch-up with galloping popular ignorance. The hoi polloi, not the fuddy-duddies, are in charge.
Print dictionaries used to act as drags on popular misunderstandings (no, ‘notorious’ does not mean ‘famous’)
This leaves English susceptible to witlessness, yet also to deliberate manipulation. We’re not talking merely about rapidly evolving slang, but about the meaning of staple, commonplace vocabulary, revised definitions of which can slyly import partisan ideological baggage to everyday discourse.
By way of example, let’s take three pairs of words, all of which, in Webster’s Third, comprised synonyms and now do not. This particular trio of lexical modifications has been imposed from the left, for in their postmodern incarnation progressives are keenly aware of language as an instrument of control.
• Sex/gender. In my 1969 dictionary, the sole difference between these two nouns is that ‘gender’ has a grammatical function in languages like French.
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