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Authors Alarmed As Oxford Junior Dictionary Drops Nature Words
Freshly Exhumed writes: Margaret Atwood, Andrew Motion, and Michael Morpurgo are among 28 authors criticizing Oxford University Press's decision to scrap a number of words associated with nature from its junior dictionary. In an open letter (PDF) released on Monday, the acclaimed writers said they are "profoundly alarmed" and urged the publisher to reinstate words cut since 2007 in the next edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary. Among words to be dropped are acorn, blackberries, and minnows.
I'm assuming they kept "iPhone" and "Android," and just removed "Blackberries"...
All of these are things a kid should come across while growing up in a few parts of the world.
Acorn is an especially disappointing word to lose--suddenly all these things falling from the sky don't have a word. We just live in a world where things fall from the sky and are undefined.
Minnows are a bit strange to lose because it's a basic fish, for a pet or for feeding to pets or for following. But I suppose you could always learn the word when you got the pet.
Finally, did they get rid of blackberries because it was racist?
The first edition of the newspeak dictionary is out. Doubleplusgood news brothers!
Uhhh, well....
"define:" and that's about it. She wont be getting an oxford "junior dictionary", wtf is that anyways..
buying the junior edition, or got 2nd hand. I never got a junior edition in my mother tongue, got myself a junior edition from oxford as a EFL student much later in file.
What can you expect from a dictionary publisher that picked "selfie" as the word of the year in 2013 and "vape" for 2014
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
What constitutes a forest might be complicated in the UK. But it's simple in the US .
No, what constitutes a forest is simple everywhere. It is just defined as ...er... a ...um... ok who who thought dropping 'forest' from the dictionary was a good idea?
They also removed Acorn, whose most lasting impact is probably the spinoff ARM Ltd. that maintains the instruction set used in these mobile computers.
Acorn is an especially disappointing word to lose--suddenly all these things falling from the sky don't have a word. We just live in a world where things fall from the sky and are undefined.
Perhaps this "Chicken Little" fear mentality is what certain influential politicians want to impose on children.
We should require all public school students, unless they have a doctor's note, to attend mandatory education at a forest for some amount of time. I'm thinking 1 week.
What constitutes a forest might be complicated in the UK.
Naw, all they have to do is hang around in Dunsinane till great Birnam wood remove to it... The UK kids tend to eat that stuff up.
Second (and I tend to agree with this one): make sure our children's learning institutions such as the public schools insist on a certain quality of product in return for our tuition/tax money. If the Oxford Junior Dictionary doesn't support all of the lessons we want our instructors to teach to our children then find one that does and buy it instead.
Its bad enough they already changed the definition of literally because nobody used it correctly.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
No word on his thoughts on berries.
I assume they only have a finite number of words and need to add ipad, tablet, app, network, internet, steam, parental lock, minecraft, DS, exit, start, logon, quit, restart, level, character, profile, desktop, youtube, google and... hangon... aren't kids old enough to use the Oxford Junior Dictionary going to be using Google or an app to look up word definitions on their own tablets.....
They also excavated a few hamsters and gerbils in duck tape
Duck tape is also being removed from the dictionary.
I tried to look up what age group this dictionary targets. It took a while to find, because this particular dictionary seems to exist in a sort of quasi-online, quasi-physical state, where the book's website tells you to go buy it, and the official OUP site doesn't recognize it.
Anyways, it's apparently aimed at ages 7 and up, and defines 13,000 words over 288 pages. You might be able to justify it, if these words are no longer in the top 13k words by usage. Then again, the common words aren't the ones you need a definition for.
This isn't unusual. Languages evolve. Words that fall out of use are being removed from the dictionary all the time. For example, the latest Webster's no longer lists "gullible".
They were replaced with: "dildo" "fist" and "transgender"........
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
...
The weather started getting rough,
The tiny ship was tossed,
If not for the courage of the fearless crew
The [redacted] would be lost, the [redacted] would be lost
The "Junior Edition" has never been a "real" dictionary. It's always been a pared down subset of the full dictionary they publish.
Complaining that it doesn't have certain words is like complaining that a Collegiate Dictionary doesn't have all the words that a full dictionary twice the size (or larger) does.
Let's face it: most people live in the urban world nowadays. They're far more likely to run into technology buzzwords than they are parts of nature. To most city dwellers, "nature" never extends beyond a walk in a manicured park.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
The Oxford Junior Dictionary contains about 3% of the Oxford English Dictionary. Some words need to be swapped out to make room for words that are more relevant to the users.
its "COPY and paste" you bastards!!!!
No, Aerial reforestation is done differently.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I thought dictionaries where supposed to include all words? Or would that make them too long?
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
Duck tape should never be in the dictionary as it's a brand name. Now Duct tape on the the other hand, shouldn't be in the dictionary either, as it's not a word in and of itself. In an encyclopedia on the other hand....
...I'd drop 'dictionary'. Who uses them instead of a website anyway?
-Styopa
It's a survivalist plot.
You can live from these 3 things in the woods if civilization collapses, but they don't want the iGeneration to know.
As Triumph would say, the correct answer is "Who gives a shit?"
Does anybody still buy dead-tree dictionaries? I don't see this being relevant outside of a few grandparents who might buy this "Junior Dictionary" for their grandkids in the mistaken belief that it isn't easier for the kiddos to just look words up online, where space is not a premium so there's no need to omit words.
Look unless you want that giant 2 foot cube book they used to have in the library... we are going to need to leave some words out.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
The dictionary used to be a very different book, meant for much more than listing definitions.
From the blog post linked below:
"The first thing you’ll notice is that the example sentences don’t sound like they came out of a DMV training manual (“the lights started flashing”) — they come from Milton and Shakespeare and Tennyson (“A thought flashed through me, which I clothed in act”)."
http://jsomers.net/blog/dictio...
After reading James Somers' post about adding the 1913 Webster's dictionary to his system I gave it a try. The old dictionary sometimes has archaic definitions but is generally much more useful and even entertaining to use.
Let me fix that for you using the junior dictionary:
Wow, I'd only be, like, OMG for stuff that is like, real, you know, not this stuff that is, like, meh, whatever.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
For the same reason, we should also ban aspirin, zipper, cellophane, velcro, teflon, freon, and linoleum from the dictionary.
Schools these days are doing an increasingly poor job of preparing the next generation to unserstand the Gilligan's Island Theme Song.
The JOED removed these because they needed the space for "surveillance", "camera", and "goodthink." They're lagging behind the USA, though, as we've shortcut the entire process by no longer requiring students to be able to read. (Or write. Or do math.)
Between that and our fabulous jobs policy*, the USA leads the world. Now, if only lead weren't toxic, we'd be ok.
* US Jobs Policy:
Step 1: Export tech jobs overseas to increase corporate profit
Step 2: Throw all low-skill immigrants back across the border
Step 3: Now US tech workers can get jobs doing lawn work, picking crops, and nannying.
It's genius!
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
(N/T)
Your 7 examples, except perhaps Velcro, are all now well established as generic names. "Duck tape" is not; most people recognize "duct tape" as the correct phrase.
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