Are dictionaries doomed to legitimize usage?

Created in October 17, 2023

2023   ·   linguistics   dictionaries

Originally a squib as part of the LING552 course by Didar Akar in the fall semester of 2023.

Dictionaries are regarded as enforcers of legitimate language by many. Indeed, they are brought up in daily conversations and TV game shows related to words as authorities of how certain lexical items are supposed to be used. Even worse, “original” (i.e. earlier) senses of words or their etymologies are brought up very frequently as arguments to “show” what words “actually” mean. However, my argument is that many dictionaries don’t assume this type of authority some people put on them and there are examples where they are not enforcers but mere mirrors, albeit a little subjective. Objectivity is ideal but never achieved.

Bourdieu talks of dictionaries as providing a normalized language1. Dictionary definitions tend to be very long to be highly accurate, and they try to contextualize them with real-life usage examples but still, they’re only there to provide a useful interface between real life and language residing within idiosyncratic minds (i.e. everyone). For example, Merriam-Webster2 (MW) and Oxford English Dictionary3 (OED) both provide real-life sentences, with MW being quite up to date with their examples.

In an ideal world, we would have dynamic dictionaries which would change continuously as the language does. Not being part of an ideal world, dictionaries need to keep up with the language’s pace as quickly as human labor allows. Who knows, maybe we’ll have computers constructing just-in-time dictionaries whenever a user asks for a definition, quite like one from the above-mentioned ideal world. For now, we will have to make do with human lexicographers.

For example, both MW and OED publish new words or update the existing definitions quite frequently. Their dictionary writers are not trying to create these new words but only observe them. After a word’s usage passes a frequency threshold, they decide it’s time to include the word so people that hear it for the first time could consult their dictionaries, hopefully with examples to go along.

OED’s “About” page mentions that “The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is widely regarded as the accepted authority on the English language.”, bolding mine. This profession of authority most definitely leads some people, whatever few amount who consult dictionaries, to adjust their set of norms in the language accordingly and also “correct” others. I’d like to think that this profession is not one of normalizing or declaring that this is how to use the language (prescriptive) but this is how it’s used currently (descriptive).

Many dictionaries of English flag regional usages. For American English, there is the example of The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE)4 which aims at “representing the full panoply of American regional vocabulary”. DARE is one example of lowering the normalization further by mapping words, and contextualizing by presenting which sense is part of a shared norm of which people.

References

  1. Bourdieu, 1991, p. 48
  2. merriam-webster.com/about-us
  3. oed.com/information/about-the-oed
  4. daredictionary.com/dare/page/about-dare
  5. Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and symbolic power. Harvard University Press, 1991.