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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!
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.
Sort algorithms.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
"Incorrect" in languages is only incorrect until we change the rules. If common language usage becomes inconsistent with the current written rules, at some point it makes more sense to change the rules to reflect the actual usage than to try to correct usage en mass*. This tends to drive language purists insane. They seem to endlessly complain when popular "made up" words get added to the dictionary, without really stopping to consider that every single word in the dictionary was "made up" at some point in history, as was every grammar rule in existence.
Languages continually evolve over time - there's nothing more or less "official" about our modern English language versus the English language of 500 years ago, even though there are significant differences. The point of a language is to communicate with each other, and just as our technology continues to evolve, so does the way in which we communicate.
* For example, since this is Slashdot, consider the attempt to encourage the public to distinguish between "hacker" and "cracker". That distinction never gained any ground, and it's likely it never will. Likewise, almost no one calls the Linux operating system GNU/Linux outside a few die-hard FSF folks.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
"Incorrect" in languages is only incorrect until we change the rules.
True but there needs to be some definition of what counts as 'we' when it comes to changing the rules. A few ignorant kids posting comments on Twitter and Facebook showing they have no clue what 'literally' means should not be enough to get the meaning changed in a dictionary. Indeed I would guess the way that most people saw the 'new' meaning was through reposts with a comment to the effect of "look what this idiot wrote".
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 "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.
When pretty much every English dictionary is in agreement on a revised definition, then we can safely conclude it's more than just a few ignorant kids posting on Facebook and Twitter.
I find it somewhat amusing to be defending the use of the "non-correct" definition of "literally" because honestly, it really irritates me as well. So, you and I can continue being irritated until the day we die, or we can accept that people are going to use the term in a figurative sense (rather ironic, given the original definition), and get on with our lives. If it makes you feel any better, keep in mind that even the new dictionary definition indicates that this is an "informal" use, so it's still not appropriate to use in most written works.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Heh, I would certainly ask you if you meant "decimate as in the Roman army definition" or "decimate as in killed a whole lot of them".
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
The junior edition contains expanded, simpler explanations for words, which take up more space, so they only include a subset of the currently recognised english langauge - its not as if this is the first time they have omitted words, they've done it ever since the first junior edition was released.
This tends to drive language purists insane. They seem to endlessly complain when popular "made up" words get added to the dictionary, without really stopping to consider that every single word in the dictionary was "made up" at some point in history, as was every grammar rule in existence.
Most complaints about change in language aren't about the introduction of some new meme-ish neologism or term that's sprung into use. The real (and justified) complaints are about changes that reflect a reduction in clarity, or which make expression surrounding critical thinking or subtlety less fashionable or in real terms more difficult. Changes in language that dumb communication down should indeed be fought against, and loudly. Giving in to the habits of the incurious, the poor communicators, and the lazy is just a way to make more of them.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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.
No, originally it was only cut and paste. Because once upon a time that was how you did large scale re-editing. You had a pair of scissors, a pot of paste, and you cut out passages and pasted them where you wanted them to be.
The problem with the redefinition of the word literally is that it has had its meaning reversed, this is tantamount to redefining the word 'correct' to mean 'incorrect'. Changing dictionary definitions for words due to common usage is bad enough, pulling a complete 180 on the definition serves only to eventually confuse all concerned.