The Politics of Dictionaries

When the storm over misogyny—a word many Australians had never heard of, and fewer had used—broke over her head, Susan Butler, editor of the Macquarie Dictionary, must have felt like Samuel Johnson, as recorded in the preface to his famous dictionary:

It is the fate of those who toil at the lower employments of life, to be rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by the prospect of good; to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise; to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward. Among these unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries.

Butler, never one to miss an opportunity for publicity, had leapt onto national radio after Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s parliamentary diatribe (Macquarie: a bitter and violent denunciation), to proclaim that for twenty or thirty years she had been aware of a modification, a broadening and softening of the word’s meaning. Rather than “a hatred of women”, it now really implied “sexism with a stronger edge to it—entrenched prejudice against women”. And that would be incorporated as a second definition in the next edition of the dictionary.

For a dictionary-maker of the descriptivist mould, who immediately scoops up every stray misconceived perversion of the language with the eagerness of a butterfly catcher, this was indeed a remarkable admission. Why had she waited twenty or thirty years? Was she not just trimming the sails of her definitions to political winds? Among the varied criticisms, Wikipedia’s entry on the dictionary quickly reflected this:

it will now vary the meaning of the word misogyny to suit the use of the word by Prime Minister Julia Gillard in an October 2012 parliamentary speech, showing that Australia has become an authoritarian politically correct society and fulfilling Orwell’s prophecies made in 1984.

One letter writer to a newspaper put both Prime Minister and Macquarie in their places:

The Macquarie Dictionary tried to make something complicated that’s pretty simple. Gillard didn’t use the word “misogyny” in a new way. She used it with the standard, ancient meaning that it’s always had.

A silly remark has not had a happy outcome for Sue Butler. (Silly, from the Anglo-Saxon saelig, originally meant happy; then it came to convey our usage innocent or simple, perhaps because innocent people were presumed to be happy. Archimago, in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, is a “Silly old man, that lives in hidden cell”. So happy became innocent and then stupid.)

Such shifts of meaning are delights for any who value the richness of the English language, and grist to the mill of a lexicographer. In 1746 Johnson had set out as a prescriptivist, in hopes of achieving precision of language by pinning down the meanings of words. He was at the helm of a great movement towards a more inflexible orthography, laying down hard and fast rules. It was Johnson who was responsible for the u in our –our words. But nine years and 42,773 entries later, he had moderated his views, somewhat regretfully:

Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote.

The furore over misogyny rekindled the old debate about recognising new words and changes of meaning. When grammar was taught, and language properly studied, a book such as Frederick Wood’s Outline History of the English Language spelt out the many ways in which words might change their meaning. Wood still makes fascinating reading:

The word for the rare expensive wood of the box tree used to make small caskets for jewels became the universal word for a container of any size and material.

To read originally meant to guess a riddle; to write meant to scratch. In 1450 a shroud had no burial significance, it meant simply a garment.

Window meant the wind-eye, today’s ventilator. Brand derives from Old English bærnan, to burn; it first meant a piece of burning wood, then a red-hot iron, next its mark on a wine cask, a sign of quality and now a trade identity.

Propaganda (Ital. propagare to spread) now has sinister overtones; likewise the verb harbour is applied to undesirables where once it merely meant to give shelter. And an amateur, who once did things for the love of them (Latin amare) may now be deprecated as unskilful.

In 1745, the British National Anthem’s line: “Confound their politics” equated the word with intrigue. To Shakespeare, policy, politics and politician suggested dishonesty and trickery. Perhaps today the words are being re-coloured.

Broadcast, a double metaphor, first from sowing seed to spreading information by word of mouth—with a suggestion of indiscretion—has now gone digital.

Idiot (Greek idiotes) was literally a private person, then madmen were segregated.

Cemetery once meant a sleeping place (Greek koimētērion), now falling asleep, passing and decease stand stead for death. The Japanese introduced comfort women; today political correctness has cloaked the blind, deaf, dumb and crippled in “challenged” disability.

Handkerchief was adopted in delicacy to avoid using muckinder, but was really a nonsense because a kerchief was a head-covering. Italian workmen tied a knot in each corner and reversed history.

To the grammarian’s categories must be added social and political influences. In many cases they result in compound terms: affirmative action, agitprop, apparatchik, axis of evil, bipartisan, collateral damage, coup d’état, doublespeak, embedded (reporters), filibuster (originally meant freebooter derived from vrijbuiter Dutch, pirate), global warming, politically correct, rubbery figures, sexual harassment, suicide bomber, tree-hugger, vegan. The widely-used word caucus meaning a party meeting or inner cabal originated in an Algonquian Indian word for counsellor. So the move to extend the catchment, so to speak, of misogyny by implying a male-dominated society subordinating, even demeaning, women must be seen as a function of feminist politics.

Not that politics in dictionary-making is new. Johnson had a vitriolic hatred of Americans, not least because of what they were doing to the English language, especially with their –or endings to –our words: “I am willing to love all mankind, except an American.” And, “Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.” Johnson died four years before the First Fleet reached Botany Bay. Who can guess what he might say about English today in this former convict outpost?

But across the Atlantic, his sentiments were warmly reciprocated by the “laborious and truculent” Noah Webster. In 1783, he published his Grammatical Institute of the English Language, with an appendix that forecast his intentions: An Essay on the Necessity, Advantages and Practicability of Reforming the Mode of Spelling, and of Rendering the Orthography of Words Correspondent to the Pronunciation. He followed it the same year with his American Spelling Book, which was immediately adopted by schools. Webster’s first dictionary in 1806 set him on a path as the great arbiter of North American language; he cemented it finally in 1828 when he published his two-volume American Dictionary of the English Language.

Webster in fact tapped a rich vein of enthusiasm for the vernacular. In 1768 the American patriot Benjamin Franklin had set the ball rolling with his Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling with Remarks and Examples Concerning the Same, and an Enquiry into its Uses. Eight years later honor appeared in the Declaration of Independence, although Jefferson’s first draft had spelled it honour. By the middle of the nineteenth century, writers such as the romantic poet James Russell Lowell were alerting fellow Americans to the richness of their dialects. A Harvard law graduate and the first editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Lowell was willing to get down and dirty to preserve the Yankee accent in The Biglow Papers:

Ef you take a sword an’ dror it
An go stick a feller thru
Guv’ment ain’t to answer to it
God’ll send the bill to you.

It was the North American antecedent of C.J. Dennis, who did it better:

Ar! But ’e makes me sick! A fair gazob!
’E’s jist the glarssy on the soulful sob,
’E’ll sigh and spruik, an’ ’owl a love-sick vow—(The silly cow!)
But when ’e’s got ’er, spliced an’ on the straight,
’E crools the pitch, and tries to kid its Fate.

Webster had founded his reform of the language on a saying by Franklin: “Those people spell best who do not know how to spell.” He therefore made a virtue out of logical and phonetic spelling, removing whole classes of silent letters. Out went the u in –our words; the final e in determine; the silent a in thread, feather and steady; the silent b in thumb; the s in island; and the second consonants in traveller, waggon and jeweller; the final k from words like frolick. The final re in centre, calibre and theatre was transposed to make er; gaol became jail, plough became plow; ph words began with f and all words in the defence class had the c changed to s. Some of these as well as the more outlandish changes have not survived, were even abandoned in subsequent editions—such as croud, tung and wimmen.

H.L. Mencken in his 1919 landmark defence of Americanisms, The American Language—An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States, says Webster made a clean sweep of the language. Indeed, but these changes by fiat, revolutionary, not evolutionary, claimed a new power for lexicographers. They were political, a clear expression of nationalism—and at the same time, a demonstration of America’s need to emphasise its identity. Such arbitrariness inevitably led to inconsistencies. Mencken’s list of anomalies that could not be explained included the substitution of a for e in grey; the retention of e in forego; the change from s to z in fuse; or the persistence of y in pygmy and gypsy. Webster, he pointed out, had denounced the k in skeptic as a “mere pedantry” but later adopted it.

Mencken produced this classification of the two orthographies, which largely obtains today:

The omission of the penultimate u in words ending in –our (favor).
The reduction of duplicate consonants to a single consonant (councilor).
The omission of a redundant e (ax).
The change of re into er (center).he omission of unaccented foreign terminations (catalog).
The omission of u when combined with a or o (balk).
The conversion of decayed diphthongs into simple vowels (anesthetic).he change of compound consonants into simple consonants (plow).
The change of o into a (naught).
The change of e into i (inquire).
The change of y into a, ia, or i (pajamas, ataxia, siphon).
The change of c into s (offense).
The substitution of s for z (advertisement).he substitution of k for c (skeptic).
The insertion of a supernumerary e (foregather).
The substitution of ct for x (inflection).
The substitution of y for i (gypsy).

Webster’s work was so powerful that it became the most widely accepted and used dictionary of the English language—until the publication in 1914 of the Concise Oxford. That was based not on the massive Oxford English Dictionary, but on A New English Dictionary, the first to focus on words in common usage.

Gilbert Milligan Tucker, on whose 1895 book American English, Our Common Speech Mencken built his work, was at pains to debunk British claims to logic or consistency in its orthography:

The British practice is, in short and to speak plainly, a jumble of confusion, without rhyme or reason, logic or consistency, and if anybody finds the American simplification of the whole matter “unpleasant”, it can be only because he is a victim of unreasoning prejudice against which no argument can prevail.

Proving that emotion, not logic, ruled in the public apperception of language, an editorial in England’s Saturday Review of December 1913 condescended: “The Americans are rich. They are, or seem to be, confident of themselves. They excel at the business of games. They make things hum. But it is absurd to pretend they speak good English.” A few years earlier, a book titled The Abounding American spat out: “The Americans, having inherited, borrowed or stolen a beautiful tongue, wilfully and of set purpose degrade, distort and mis-spell it.” James Lowell saw these English objections to the simplifications as “an esthetic hatred burning with as fierce a flame as ever did theological hatred”.

Mencken’s masterwork did not overlook Aust­ralia, where “The English spelling is official,” he intoned, “but various American forms are making fast progress.” He quoted one of the leading Australian magazines, Triad, as deploring that “horrible American inaccuracies of spelling are coming into common use in the newspapers”. No less a person than the Chief Justice of the Commonwealth, Sir Adrian Knox (1863–1932) denounced the American –er endings, and the May 1921 edition of Triad joined in: “Unhappily, we have no English Academy to guard the purity and integrity of the language. Everything is left to the sense and loyalty of decently cultivated people.”

It was perhaps with the thought of establishing an Australian Academy to celebrate and cultivate the English language in its local usage that Arthur Delbridge began working on a local dictionary in 1970. Delbridge had made a name for himself in language studies—he established the Phonetics Laboratory in Sydney University and was known to every ABC sub-editor as Chairman of the Commission’s Committee on Spoken English, an ever-helpful resource for pronunciations when new and difficult names popped up in the news.

In 1959 and 1960 Delbridge and Professor A.G. Mitchell had carried out the world’s first socio-linguistic study by recording and analysing the speech patterns of 9000 school children around Australia. Their letter to each school setting out their objective is a model of clear prose worth recording:

We are carrying out a piece of research by which we hope to discover with some precision the pattern of speech variation in Australia. We are also hoping to find out what the answer might be to questions such as these:

Are there any regional variations in Australia?

Do variations in speech habits correspond with social status and home background?

Nearly forty years later, a major audio engineering project recovered the voices from the hundreds of discarded tapes and re-issued the sounds and companion documents.

In 1966 Delbridge followed Mitchell to the new Macquarie University, becoming the Foundation Professor of English (Language and Linguistics). After eleven years work with a small team which included Susan Butler, the first Macquarie Dictionary appeared, to acclaim in academic circles. Manning Clark wrote an exuberant (if somewhat obscure) foreword to “a magnificent collection of the words and idioms we use not just when we talk or write to each other, but of the essential tools with which we will cut a mark on humanity’s epitaph”.

An early advertisement stressed the Australian character:

The Macquarie contains many words which reflect the uniqueness of the Australian way of life, many of which appear in no comparable dictionary. Beanbag, alf, home unit, brickfielder, bombo, wool cheque, boat people and surf club are examples.

By the fourth edition in 2006, however, Thomas Keneally’s foreword carried a warning about the inclusion of what he termed “weasel words” which sanitised reality. He cited bunker buster, carpet bombing, digital dividend, genetic pollution, magic bullet, harm minimisation, person of interest, target audience, surveil. “These are perhaps above all the terms we must get a grasp of and see through, if we are to remain effective and discriminating citizens.”

It was one sign that dictionaries were now operating in an increasingly political environment. Perhaps coincidentally, this seems to have chimed with the dictionary’s move to Sydney University and its publication by Macmillan. When the concise version of the Macquarie appeared in 1982, Arthur Delbridge’s preface had said this: “it is assumed that readers of dictionaries are not looking for the inclusion of language uses that have come out of ignorance or incompetence and that lack, as yet, any support in the community”.

Contrast that with the preface to the fifth edition of the main dictionary in 2009, written by Professor Stephen Leeder, an epidemiologist: “Words of the vocabulary of climate change have been harvested from the sciences and from general speech and use.” The reason, he explained, was the need for the “rectification of our language to assist in rebuilding and remodelling our relationships with our environment, to sustain and nourish Australia”.

How soon to recognise a newly-coined word is a valid question for any dictionary compiler. There is a suspicion of triumphalism in the Macquarie’s recognition of populist words and terms, and some evidence of attachment to shooting stars of language. The winners in Macquarie’s “Word of the Year” award have not always had a long shelf life:

2006 muffin top: the fold of fat around the midriff of an overweight woman.
2007 pod slurping: the downloading of large quantities of data to an MP3 player or memory stick from a computer.
2008 toxic debt: debt, which although initially acquired as a legitimate business transaction, proves subsequently to be financially worthless, as the subprime loans which precipitated the GFC.
2009 tweet: to post a message on the social network site Twitter.
2010 googleganger: a person with the same name as oneself, whose online references are mixed with one’s own among search results for one’s name.
2011 burqini: a swimsuit designed for Muslim women.

Other words given honourable mention in recent years include: dairyness (the productivity of a cow); beatboxing (arts); food porn (eating); planking (internet) and soy cap (politics). The lexicographer’s alibi seems to be that if a word doesn’t stick, it can always be expunged from the next edition. Veteran Canberra journalist Jack Waterford observed: “That’s why the Macquarie is fashionable, but not authoritative.”

Sue Butler’s enthusiasm for words, and her willingness to explain and debate their etymology, have at times landed her in trouble. In 2003, invited on Channel Seven’s Sunrise to discuss the offensiveness of words like boofhead, she shut down the interview and threw the channel into panic with: “You know: ‘You are a f***wit.’ Well obviously we know that’s bad.” Seven years later, she used the same shock treatment without effect, on an audience of the Sydney Institute, proving its members more resolute, or more worldly.

So, when parliament added misogyny to the vocabulary of the average Australian, the Macquarie Dictionary had an opportunity, but some considerable ground to catch up. Ten years ago an Oxford Dictionary Online update recognised: “the hatred or dislike of, or prejudice against women”. Feminists had long ago re-defined the word to mean, more importantly than hating, actions demeaning, suppressing or discriminating against women. They went back to cite Aristotle, deploring his definition of a woman’s reduced role in society—although admitting he gave equal weight to the happiness of both sexes. Christine de Pizan, born in Venice in 1363, married at fifteen, widowed ten years later, who supported her family for the next thirty years on the earnings from her poetry, was celebrated as the first feminist by writers such as Simone de Beauvoir. In Cité des Dames, de Pizan wrote:

I could hardly find a book on morals, where even before I had read it in its entirety, I did not find several chapters or certain sections attacking women, no matter who the author was.

America’s leading medievalist, Howard Bloch of Yale University, says one of the defining presumptions of feminist analysis is the omnipresence of misogynist attitudes in our culture. He explored its development and enduring nature in his 1991 work Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love:

The denunciation of women reaching back to the Old Testament and to Ancient Greece and extending through classical Hellenic, Judaic, and Roman traditions all the way to the 15th Century, constitutes something of a cultural constant. It dominates ecclesiastical writing, letters, sermons, theological tracts and canon law; scientific works as part of biological, gynecological and medical knowledge, folklore and philosophy. It runs like a vein throughout medieval literature … the topic of virginity lies at the core of the medieval discourse of misogyny.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) initiated the first organised women’s rights and suffrage movements in the USA. Her lasting contribution to women’s emancipation was The Woman’s Bible of 1895, a political treatise (recently re-published), which picked through the Authorised Version to expose all the discriminatory texts. “The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality,” she wrote.

For a dictionary so alert to the latest slang, technical term or social fad, the Macquarie was exposed for having overlooked misogyny. Buried in the formal statement on its website about the brouhaha was this disclaimer of a political fix, and this admission:

It does not matter to the dictionary editors who said the word or about whom it was used. What matters is that we realised that there was a sense of this word that was in common use, and had been for a good number of years, and it was not covered in the dictionary.

Undoubtedly, on this word, the Macquarie has now got it right. And we can expect Sue Butler, the prescriptivist lexicographer, to enforce the extended meaning, to the benefit of her feminist sisters. In 2003, she proposed that everyone had the right to maintain their own practice when meaning or usage shifted. Writing for the ABC’s Australian Word Map of regionalisms, she said: “But rights go with obligations, and in this case the obligation is to accept as a legitimate variation those changes which are accepted by the community at large.”

The Macquarie rules! But the misogyny episode has drawn attention to the larger problem of the dictionary’s philosophy, which seems, either in response to marketing pressure or social convictions, altogether too eager to recognise passing popular argot. Its editorial team seems to have departed from Arthur Delbridge’s precept, and would do well to reflect on Samuel Johnson’s advice:

The real question is how soon a newly-coined word should be recognised by a lexicographer, and how much weight should be accorded to words “depraved by ignorance” simply because their use has been recorded.