Sue Bailey

Someone accused me of being a consultant yesterday. Maybe, maybe…

(from My First Dictionary and Despair.com)

Found on the Mercury News this morning. Seems like “like” as “approximately” has, like, made it.

The Telegraph reports that lots of words have been removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary. The lists of removed words they print – with no indication whether these are exhaustive or not – are big on animals and plants, with a sprinkling of imperial and religious terms also gone. Complaints are concentrating on the “words associated with Christianity and British History” – plants and animals being, apparently, less worth whipping up outrage fighting for.

The way some commentators are talking*, you’d think that these words had been banned from use. They haven’t. They’ve been removed from a children’s dictionary, which is possibly the single most useless reference book published in the UK today.

Even when I was a child, I did not get the point of children’s dictionaries. “If you don’t know how to spell it, look it up in the dictionary,” my junior school teachers used to say. “If I don’t know how to spell it, how can I look it up in an alphabetised reference work?” I used to think, very loudly, and wish I were the sort of naughty child who would have said that out loud to a teacher. I would imagine today, schoolchildren are more likely to use Google to check a spelling than pick up a dictionary, and rightly so: it’s a much more effective tool. When was the last time a dictionary asked you “did you mean….”?

And if you’re using a dictionary to look up the meaning of a word, then you’re not going to need a children’s dictionary, which has since time immemorial contained only a dull culling of impoverished vocabulary. Anyone who doesn’t know the meaning of “blog” or “celebrity” already isn’t going to bother looking it up in a book.

If, on the other hand, your child is an embryo word-whore, she’s already reading the grown-up dictionary for herself, cover to cover: she despises the children’s dictionary. Take it from one who did.

So I start to wonder what the purpose of a children’s dictionary really is. To be a gift from a relative who really should do better? To make parents feel smug because they have such a book on the shelf? To be a list of words we think our children ought to know?

Even if Christianity is a thing you want to teach your children (or teach your children about, which is something entirely different), most of the religious words the OJD has lost have got nothing to do with twenty-first century Christianity. Abbey, monastery, nunnery, monk, nun: these were torn out of the Church in England in 1541, just as pews and pulpits were torn out of ‘modernised’ church buildings in the second half of the twentieth century. Call it a blow against the teaching of history if you like, but it’s not a blow against Christianity because these are words that Christianity itself has given up. They have as much to do with the life of the average eight year old as gooseberry, porcupine, allotment.

Vineeta Gupta, head of children’s dictionaries at OUP, makes a reasonable point: “We are limited by how big the dictionary can be – little hands must be able to handle it.”

Ms Gupta’s right, of course. But from the vile and racist comments being aimed at her in the Telegraph’s comments, you’d think a dictionary was a work of propaganda, a list of what Every English Child ought to know. Are we really calling this stunted list of mundane words aspirational? I don’t think so. If anything, it’s a lowest common denominator: if your kids don’t know these, then there’s something wrong.

* though I must admit, I’m quite pleased that so many are citing NewSpeak rather than reaching automatically for the Nazis.

Collins are to include the word ‘meh’ in the new edition of their dictionary, to be published next year. This is an odd little story. Elaine Higgleton, the editorial director at Collins Dictionaries, makes it sound like an ordinary vocabulary test:

We ran this campaign to encourage the public to tell us about the words that they use every day, but that aren’t in the dictionary.

But the piece reads more like Strictly Come Dictionary, with meh having somehow outdanced its fellow neologisms to make it to the hallowed pages. Its competitors – jargonaut, frenemy, huggles are cited – are John Sergeants of words: their ugliness makes them irresistable for a moment, but you know you’ll dump them for words that can really dance.

For anyone who *hasn’t* had a conversation with me recently, “meh” is an expression of extreme indifference or boredom. Its origins are disputed, though its popularity – like my other favourite embiggen – is almost certainly due to its use in The Simpsons. Episode 2F15 is the earliest I know of:

Bart: [whining] Oh, these renaissance fairs are so boring.
Marge: Oh, really? Did you see the loom? I took loom in high school.
[Marge hums, quickly weaves "Hi Bart, I am weaving on a loom"]
Bart: [pause] Meh.

But perhaps more importantly, episode CABF09 for the actual spelling:

Homer: Kids, how would you like to go to … Blockoland!
Bart & Lisa: Meh.
Homer: But the TV gave me the impression that –
Bart: We said, “Meh!”
Lisa: M. E. H. Meh.

I’m so delighted, I think I’ll get one of these to celebrate.

D’oh made the OED back in 2001

The BBC reports that several local councils have banned their staff from using Latin words and phrases in either speech or writing, for being confusing, elitist and discriminatory. This is a great opportunity for those of us who really didn’t give an airbourne copulation about Manuelgate to get incensed about something that really matters. The venerable Mary Beard calls it “the linguistic equivalent of ethnic cleansing”.

Parliaments may desire the limitation of arcane vocabulary, and such would be a laudible aspiration: I cannot accept that a democracy can be such if it is incomprehensible to its citizens. But no one is capable of prohibiting Latin influence on a Brittanic idiom: it would be necessary to dismantle the entire edifice of the language (from Old French langage (12c.), from Vulgar Latin *linguaticum, from Latin lingua “tongue,” also “speech, language”) itself. Even the word “council” comes ultimately from Latin concilium.

There are some scanty specifics in the BBC’s version of the story. Bournemouth Council have given staff a list of 18 Latin phrases which they’re advised not to use. “Other local councils” (who, BBC? who?)

have banned “QED” and “ad hoc”, while other typical Latin terms include “bona fide”, “ad lib” and “quid pro quo”.

(emphasis mine) We see what you did there.

I suspect this of being a bit of a Winterval story: a delicious, irresistable mix of Loony Local Council, simplification, overstatement and Political Correctness Gone Mad. Who needs accuracy when you have a recipe this good. I’ll be looking forward to what Clarkson has to say on the matter: The Sun defends the right to speak Latin. Oh, yes please.

Still, it does make way for the most ridiculous pronouncement I’ve ever seen from the Plain English Campaign:

the ban might stop people confusing the Latin abbreviation e.g. with the word “egg”.

This is too good to be left in the depths of the BBC: Swansea council emailed a translator to ask for a Welsh version of their English roadsign. The response they got reads I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated. So that’s what they put on the sign.

I have a confession: I really rather like reality television. Not (I hasten to undo the damage I just did to my library cred) Big Brother-type reality where the point is to be the loudest, shrillest, drunkest slapper in a closed environment. I like shows where people do stuff. America’s Next Top Model is a traffic accident in my living room: I can’t stop looking at it. All those skinny, beautiful girls, crashing and burning under Tyra’s hyper-critical eye, bitching and purging and falling off their platform shoes. Irresistable.

Which brings me to The Restaurant. Instinctively, I feel this is a bit more classy than ANTM. For one thing, it’s on the BBC. For another thing, it features Sexy Frenchman^TM Raymond Blanc. And for a third thing, it has people doing stuff, viz. failing at being restaurateurs. At least, that’s what I thought it was about, until I heard M. Blanc dismiss one couple by telling them (you may imagine this in a French accent: it will pain me too much to write it in Mallory Towers Mamzelle style “zee ozzers”) “I just don’t think you want it as much as the others”.

When did this happen? You get to open a restaurant with one of the world’s most famous chefs, not by being the best cook, running the slickest front of house, but by wanting it the most. It happens on ANTM too: “I want it more than anyone in this house” said one weeping clothes horse recently. Not “I take the best pics” or “I have the best catwalk wiggle”, just “I want it more”. I’m sure that if I put my mind to it, I could want to be America’s Next Top Model more than any of those girls, despite the facts that I am twenty years too old, and if you sliced me up, you could still make three of what they laughably call “plus sized” models. But I’d want it more, so I’d win.

How do we measure wanting anyway? What’s the SI unit of want? It’s less a metric system than a sliding scale of what you’re prepared to do on television: I’ll upset a room full of diners, you’ll be filmed puking, she’ll get her kebab out for the nation to feast their eyes on. You just have to want it so badly, you’ll do anything to get it, where ‘it’ is your 15 minutes. Jade, for the win.

You might guess that homonyms entertain me. Fluke, for example, is a great word: it’s a fish, and a whale’s tail: what a lucky chance, eh?

Better still if they’re from two different languages. Having the same meaning is incredibly rare and so delightful. The Persian word bad means the same as the English word bad, though historically there’s no connection between them: this fact was gleaned from my first ever Old Norse class, and wasn’t I just terrified to be told such stuff rather than gotten through the syllabus. My bad.

But different meanings certainly make for more fun. How else would Ford have named a car with the Brazillian slang for little penis, or Toyota have called their MR2 shit in French? Though there’s some argument as to whether Zune means fuck in Hebrew, I can’t imagine it’s a discussion that Microsoft relish.

Which brings me to the Indian takeaway. I’m sure doom or dóm or similar is a perfectly good word for tasty vegetable stew, but I can’t help wondering if it’s going to leave me regretting asking for the hottest thing on the menu.

Bonus points for the restaurant being Mutley Spice. I wonder if they serve pigeon?