This probably sounds impossibly nerdy, but during my teenage years I used to read the dictionary for fun. Sometimes I would look up a word I had come across in a book; other times I would just open up my grandparents’ old hardback volume and read the definitions of random words. It also gave me a sense of armament, as if I was giving my intellect the weapons it would need to do battle in the world of ideas.
I have always viewed a dictionary as a sort of rule book. With its invention, Robert Cawdrey and his successors brought order to one of the most chaotic languages on earth. But of course a dictionary’s role is also to catalogue new developments in the English language, which – as everyone from academics to pulp fiction writers has noted – does not exist in a bell jar.
I have never understood, however, the post-modernist penchant to validate the chronic misuse of a word by adding it to the list of definitions. It’s like a soccer referee deciding a handball should no longer get a penalty because players keep breaking that rule. It has happened with words like jealous and nauseous, and in recent times such changes have taken on a more odious aspect: they have become politically driven.
Take, for example, the word misogynist. The definition is pretty simple: someone who hates women. But when, in 2012, then Prime Minister Julia Gillard went on a rant about misogyny, applying it to things which simply weren’t misogyny, the folks at the Macquarie Dictionary – presumably not conservative voters – fell over themselves to add a second definition.
“We decided that we had the basic definition, hatred of women, but that's not how misogyny has been used for about the last 20, 30 years, particularly in feminist language," said the Macquarie’s editor, Sue Butler.
“Feminist language”? It was nothing but the misappropriation of a word for political purposes and The Macquarie Dictionary should have known better.
Or let’s examine the word racism. The 2002 edition of The Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary, which I keep on my desk at work, lists the definition as 1. Belief in the superiority of a particular race; prejudice based on this. 2. Antagonism towards other races.
In the decade or so since then, there has been a push to broaden the definition of racism to the point where it is almost meaningless. I’m put in mind of a line from an Australian movie, Idiot Box, where one of the characters says, “I reckon something is a poem if you say it is.” In 2014, we seem to be fast approaching a point where something is racism if you say it is. But worse than that, those with a political agenda have, like Gillard and her cheer squad, tried to twist its definition to suit their own purposes. In a recent debate on Facebook, for instance, a commenter wrote:
“Racism, like sexism, is about a legacy of structural power and privilege. It does not occur in a vacuum… It is systemically established over a long period of time through power relations.”
I have seen this new ‘definition’ come up a few times, always from those lugging around a sackful of white guilt. They have adopted it because it means that only white people (and they are invariably white themselves) can be racist. So far, thankfully, it does not seem to have gained traction with the world’s dictionary editors.
Words should be flexible, but they should not be contorted at the whims of the ignorant or those with a political agenda. And the gatekeepers of our language – the editors of the world’s great dictionaries – should strive to defend it from such attacks.
