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.
My eBay account manager sent me an email today containing this image* of a so-called “Christmas” “Tree”. As a 
I love how half-hearted 
