课文But What is a Dictionary For

But What's a Dictionary For? Bergen Evans The storm of abuse in the popular press that greeted the appearance of Webster's Third New International Dictionary is a curious phenomenon. Never has a scholarly work of this stature been attacked with such unbridled fury and contempt. An article in the Atlantic viewed it as a "disappointment," a "shock," a " calamity ," "a scandal and a disaster. " The New York Times, in a special editorial, felt that the work would " accelerate the deterioration " of the language and sternly accused the editors of betraying a public trust. The Journal of the American Bar Association saw the publication as " deplorable ," "a flagrant example of lexicographic irresponsibility," "a serious blow to the cause of good English." Life called it "a non- deluge " monstrous ", " abominable ," and "a cause for dismay." They doubted that "Lincoln could have modelled his Gettysburg Address" on it – a concept of how things get written that throws very little light on Lincoln but a great deal on Life. What underlies all this sound and fury? Is the claim of the G. R C. Merriam Company, probably the world's greatest dictionary maker, that the preparation of the work cost $3.5 million, that it required the efforts of three hundred scholar s over a period of twenty – seven years, working on the largest collection of citations ever assembled in any language -- is all this a fraud, a hoax ? So monstrous a discrepancy in evaluation requires us to examine basic principles. Just what's a dictionary for? What does it propose to do? What does the common reader go to a dictionary to find? What has the purchaser of a dictionary a right to expect for his money? Before we look at basic principles, it is necessary to interpose two brief statements. The first of these is that a dictionary is concerned with words. Some dictionaries give various kinds of other useful information. Some have tables of weights and measures on the flyleaves . Some list historical events and some, home remedies . And there’s nothing wrong with their so doing. But the great increase in our vocabulary in the past three decades compels all dictionaries to make more efficient use of their space. And if something must be eliminated , it is sensible to throw out these extraneous things and stick to words. The second brief statement is that there has been even more progress in the making of dictionaries in the past thirty years than there has been in the making of automobiles The difference, for example, between the much-touted Second International (1934) and the much-clouted Third International (1961) is not like the difference between yearly models but like the difference between the horse and buggy and the automobile. Between the appearance of these two editions a whole new science related to the making of dictionaries, the science of descriptive linguistics, has come into being. Modern linguistics gets its charter from Leonard Bloomfield's Language (1933). Bloomfield's for thirteen years professor of Germanic philology at the University of Chicago and for nine years professor of linguistics at Yale, was one of those inseminating scholars who can’ t be relegated to any department and don't dream of accepting established categories and procedures just because they're established. He was as much an anthropologist as a linguist, and his concepts of language were shaped not by Strunk's Elements of Style but by his knowledge of Cree Indian dialects. The broad general findings of the new science are: 1. All languages are systems of human conventions , not systems of natural laws. The first -- and essential – step in the study of any language is observing and setting down precisely what happens when native speakers speak it. 2. Each language is unique in its pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. It cannot be described in terms of logic or of some theoretical, ideal language. It cannot be described in terms of any other language, or even in terms of its own past. 3. All languages are dynamic rather than static, and hence a "rule" in any language can only be a statement of contemporary practice. Change is constant -- and normal 4. "Correctness" can rest only upon usage, for the simple reason that there is nothing else for it to rest on. And all usage is relative. From these propositions it follows that a dictionary is good only insofar as it is a comprehensive and accurate description of current usage. And to be comprehensive it must include some indication of social and regional associations. New dictionaries are needed because English changed more in the past two generations than at any other time in its history. It has had to adapt to extraordinary cultural and technological changes, two world wars, unparalleled changes in transportation and communication, and unprecedented movements of populations. More subtly , but pervasively, it has changed under the influence of mass education and the growth of democracy. As written English is used by increasing millions and f-or more reasons than ever before, the language has become more utilitarian and more informal. Every publication in America today includes pages that would appear, to the purist of forty years ago, unbuttoned gibberish . Not that they are; they simply show that you can't hold the language of one generation up as a model for the next. It's not that you mustn't. You can't. For example, in the issue in which Life stated editorially that it would folly the Second International, there were over forty words constructions, and meanings which are in the Third International but not in the Second. The issue of the New York Times which hailed the Second International as the authority to which it would adhere and the Third International as a scandal and a betrayal which it would reject used one hundred and fifty-three separate words, phrases, and constructions which are listed in the Third International but not g the Second and nineteen others which are condemned in the Second. Many of them are used many times, more than three hundred such uses in all. The Washington Post, in an editorial captioned "Keep Your Old Webster's, " says, in the first sentence, "don't throw it away," and in the second, "hang on to it." But the old Webster's labels don't "colloquial" and doesn't include "hang on to," in this sense, at all. In short, all of these publications are written in the language that the Third International describes, even the very editorials which scorn it. And this is no coincidence , because the Third International isn't setting up any new standards at all; it is simply describing what Life, the Washing-ton Post, and the New York Times are doing. Much of the dictionary's material comes from these very publications, the Times, in particular, furnishing more of its illustrative quotations than any other newspaper. And the papers have no choice. No journal or periodical could sell a single issue today if it restricted itself to the American language of twenty-eight years ago. It couldn't discuss halt the things we are inter ester in, and its style would seem stiff and cumbrous . If the editorials were serious, the public -- and the stockholders -- have reason to be grateful that the writers on these publications are more literate than the editors. And so back to our questions: what's a dictionary for, and how, in 1962, can it best do what it ought to do? The demands are simple. The common reader turns to a dictionary for information about the spelling, pronunciation, meaning, and proper use of words. He wants to know what is current and respectable. But he wants – and has a right to – the truth, the full truth. And the full truth about any language, and especially about American English today, is that there are many areas in which certainty is impossible and simplification is misleading. Even in so settled a matter as spelling, a dictionary cannot always be absolute. Theater is correct, but so is theatre. And so are traveled and travelled, plow and plough, catalog and catalogue, and scores of other variants The reader may want a single certainty. He may have taken an unyielding position in an argument, he may have wagered in support of his conviction and may demand that the dictionary "settle" the matter. But neither his vanity nor his purse is any concern of the dictionary's; it must record the facts. And the fact here is that there are many words in our language which may be spelled, with equal correctness, in either of two ways. So with pronunciation. A citizen listening to his radio might notice that James B. Conant, Bernard Baruch, and Dwight D. Eisenhower pronounce economics as ECKuhnomiks, while A. Whitney Griswold, Adlai Stevenson, and Herbert Hoover pronounce it EEKuhnomiks. He turns to the dictionary to see which of the two pronunciations is "right" and finds that they are both acceptable. Has he been betrayed‘? Has the dictionary abdicated its responsibility? Should it say that one must speak like the president of Harvard or like the president of Yale, like the thirty-first President of the United States or like the thirty-fourth? Surely it's none of its business to make a choice. Not because of the distinction of these particular speakers; lexicography, like God, is no respecter of persons. But because so wide-spread and conspicuous a use of two pronunciations among people of this elevation shows that there are two pronunciations. Their speaking establishes the fact which the dictionary must record. The average purchaser of a dictionary uses it most often, probably, to find out what a word "means." As a reader, he wants to know what an author intended to convey. As a speaker or writer, he wants to know what a word will convey to his auditor s. And this, too, is complex, subtle, and for ever changing. An illustration is furnished by an editorial in the Washington Post (January 17, 1962). After a ringing appeal to those who "love truth and accuracy" and the usual bombinations about "abdication of authority" and " barbarism ," the editorial charges the Third International with " pretentious and obscure verbosity " and specifically instances its definition of "so simple an object as a door.” The definition reads: a movable piece of firm material or a structure supported usu. along one side and swinging on pivots or hinges , sliding along a groove , roiling up and down, revolving as one of four leaves, or folding like an accordion by means of which an opening may be closed or kept open for passage into or out of a building, room, or other covered enclosure or a car, airplane, elevator, or other vehicle. Then follows a series of special meanings, each particularity defined and, where necessary, illustrated by a quotation Since, aside from roaring and admonishing the "gentle men from Springfield" that "accuracy and brevity are virtues,” the Post's editorial tails to explain what is wrong with the definition, we can only infer from "so simple" a thing that the writer takes the plain, downright, man-in-the street attitude that a door is a door and any damn fool knows that. But if so, he has walked into one of lexicography's biggest booby traps: the belief that the obvious is easy to define. Whereas the opposite is true. Anyone can give a fair description of the strange, the new, or the unique. It's the commonplace, the habitual, that challenges definition, for its very commonness compels us to define it in uncommon terms. Dr. Johnson was ridiculed on just this score when his dictionary appeared in 1755. For two hundred years his definition of a network as "any thing reticulated or decussated , at equal distances, with interstices between the inter sections” has been good for a laugh. But in the merriment one thing is always overlooked: no one has yet come up with a better definition! Subsequent dictionaries defined it as a mesh and then defined a mesh as a network. That's simple, all right. Anyone who attempts sincerely to state what the were door means in the United States of America today can't take refuge in a log cabin. There has been an enormous proliferation of closing and demarking devices and structure in the past twenty years, and anyone who tries to thread his way through the many meanings now included under door may have to sacrifice brevity to accuracy and even have to employ words that a limited vocabulary may find obscure. Is the entrance to a tent a door, for instance? And What of the thing that seals the exit of an air plane‘? Is this a door? Or what of those sheets and jets of air that are now being used, in place of old-fashioned oak and hinges, to screen entrances and exists? Are they doors? And what of that accordion-like things that set off various sections of many modern apartments? The fine print in the lease takes it for granted that they are door s and that spaces demarked by them are rooms -- and the rent is computed on the number of rooms. Was I gypped by the landlord when he called the folding contraption that shuts off my kitchen a door? I go to the Second Inter national, which the editor of the Post urges me to use in preference to the Third International. Here I find that a door is The movable frame or barrier of boards, or other material, usually turning on hinges or pivots or sliding, by which an entranceway into a house or apartment is closed and opened; also, a similar part of a piece of furniture, as in a cabinet or book case. This is only forty-six words, but though it includes the cellar it excludes the barn door and the accordion-like thing So I go on to the Third International. I see at once that. the new definition is longer. But I'm looking for accuracy,and if I must sacrifice brevity. to get it, then I must. And sure enough, in the definition which raised the Post's blood pressure, I find the words "folding like an accordion.” The thing is a door, and my landlord is using the word in one of its currently accepted meanings. The new dictionary may have many faults. Nothing that tries to meet an ever-changing situation over a terrain as vast as contemporary English can hope to be free of them and much in it is open to honest and informed, disagreement. There can be linguistic objection to the eradication of proper names. The removal of guides to pronunciation from the toot of every page may not have been worth the valuable space it saved. The new method of defining words of many meanings has disadvantages as well as advantages. And of the half million or more definitions, hundreds, possibly thousands, may seem inadequate or imprecise. To some (of whom I am one) the omission of the label "colloquial" will seem meritorious ; to others it will seem a loss. But one thing is certain: anyone who solemnly announces in the year 1962 that he will be guided in matter s of English usage by a dictionary published in 1934 is talking ignorant and pretentious nonsense. (from The Play of Language, 1971) NOTES 1) Abraham Lincoln (1809 – 1865): 16th President of the United States in office from 1861-1865; died from an assassin's bullet at the end of the Civil War. Once regarded as the "Great Emancipator" for his forward strides in freeing the slaves, he was criticized a century later, when the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum, for his caution in moving to-ward equal rights. 2) Gettysburg Address: the memorable words by President Abraham Lincoln at the dedication of the soldiers’ National Cemetry at Gettysbrug, Pennsylvania, on Nov. 19, 1863 3) G & C Merriam Company: the company in Springfield, Massachusetts,publishing the Webster dictionaries 4) Leonard Bloomfield ( 1887- 1949): American linguist. He published Language (1933), which became a standard work on the science of linguistics. An American school of linguistics developed in the 1920's and 1930's under the leadership of Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield. 5) Cree Indian: An Algonkin-speaking North American Indian tribe, whose territory covered a vast area of north central Canada from Hudson Bay on the east almost to Lake Athabaska on the west 6) James Bryant Conant (1893 - 1978): American chemist and educator; President of Harvard University (1933 - 53), Emeritus President (1953- 1978) 7) Bernard Baruch (1870 - 1965): American financier. Philanthropist and public official. As a public official, a self-made multimillionaire, and adviser to several presidents, Baruch reflected the temper of the American.scene for half a century. 8) Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890 - 1969): The 34th President of the United States in office from 1953 - 1961. Before being elected President he was supreme commander of the Allied F.xpeditionary Forces (1944 - 45),commander of U. S. occupation lorces in Europe ( 1945), U. S. Arm Chief of Staff (1945 - 48), and supreme commander of NATO force(1950- 52). 9) A Whitney Griswold ( 1906 - 1963 ): American educationist. In July-1950 he became the 16th president of Yale University. 10) Adlai Stevenson (1900 - 65): American political leader. His importance.lay chiefly in his efforts to raise the level of political debate in the United States. Unsuccessful in two presidential campaigns, Stevenson never dominated United States politics, but he did effect the ways in which Americans looked at and discussed public affairs. 11) Herbert Hoover ( 1874 - 1964): The 31st President of the United States in office from 1929 to 1933 12) usu: abbreviated form of 'usually' 13)'gentlemen from Springfield': referring to the makers of Webster's Third New International Dictionary (see note 3)