What Constitutes Bad Language For A Dictionary Editor? – Sue Butler

Susan Butler has worked on the Macquarie Australian Dictionary since it began in 1970, and was involved in the production of the first edition in 1981. She also oversees The Dinkum Dictionary, which records the etymology and meanings of colloquial Australian words and expressions. Having recently completed work on the fifth edition of the Macquarie Dictionary, Sue Butler shared some of her favourite new additions with The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 27 January.

BAD LANGUAGE

SUSAN BUTLER

What constitutes bad language for a dictionary editor?

For the general community the most obvious meaning of bad language is, to quote the dictionary, “coarse language usually involving much swearing”.

Of course what constitutes swearing has changed from blasphemy to references to sex and bodily functions. These days there has been a further shift in taboos to words relating to stereotypes. Identifying someone by their ethnic background is a no-no, even when it doesn’t involve using one of the clearly and intentionally offensive terms. Equally, identifying people by any physical characteristic is dangerous.

As I remarked on the Sunrise program a few years ago, it is more dangerous to say someone is fat than to say they are a fuckwit.  I proved that the transfer from the old taboos to the new ones was not yet complete because the producer immediately yanked me off the show. However the next day, when he had calmed down, he admitted that they had had very few calls of outrage because of my on-air obscenity – more disappointment from callers who had thought it was an interesting discussion cut short.

Among the colloquialisms listed for Word of the Year 2008 was “fantapants”,a reference to a person whose hair is naturally red. Hair on the top of your head can be dyed so many different colours that the only sure way to spot a redhead is to look below. This produced some calls from people who thought it was offensive to identify redheads – not in this way particularly but in any way. They regarded themselves as a minority group persecuted for their red hair so any reference to it was taboo.

It is easier to give offence in today’s language than you might imagine.

From the point of view of the dictionary editor, bad language is language that fails to get into the dictionary. Success is based on numbers which prove that the word is a token of exchange, not necessarily in the whole community but at least in a subsection of it. If you look at the words added to the dictionary last year, your response to them would depend on your interests, activities, age, gender, and so on.

Unsuccessful candidates probably include some of the words we would all hate. For example, in the tide of inclusive language there were, on one side, coinages that pushed the boundaries too far and, on the other, inventions designed to be silly so as to embarrass the feminists. Remember all those “-challenged” concoctions? We had to be careful to establish community currency in all this so as not to be caught out by either side. Some American dictionaries included “waitron” in a burst of political correctness. As far as I can see, even in American English “waitron” is a non-word and the dictionaries that included it were chided for allowing zeal to take over from the basic rules of dictionary inclusion. Certainly Australian English has remained untroubled by the word.

So as a dictionary editor I include the good words, the nice words, that words that are witty, honest, charming, informative, but I also include the words that give offence and horrify at least some section of the community, the words that are weasel words, euphemisms, excessive jargon, politically correct, and all obnoxious items in many ways, as long as I can establish currency for them. Then the hope is that the entry in the dictionary catches the flavour of the word by the labelling that indicates intent or a restricted use, the illustrative sentence, the etymology, the usage note. There are opportunities at every level of the entry to give, not just the meaning of the word, but also information about the way in which it is used.

I wish now to take off my dictionary hat, because as an individual I have the right to love and hate words, to pick and choose just as much as anyone else. I don’t like ‘Absolutely!’ I had to wrench that out of my own speech practice when it threatened to take over. It’s quite insidious. I don’t like’literally’when it is used incorrectly. We have a lovely example in the dictionary. Thestandardusesof literally are dealt with:

adverb

1. in a literal manner; word for word: to translate literally.
DEF-see DEF-cf
2. in the literal sense: parachutists dropping in, literally.
DEF-see DEF-cf

But then we go on to deal with “literally” as it is now used as an intensifier:

a. (applied to a literal meaning): literally screaming with excitement.
b. (applied to a figurative meaning):

Amanda Vanstone said in 2006,”But I can assure you we are literally bending over backwards” – it’s a frightening thought – “to take into account the concerns raised bycolleagues.” So that’s when using it as an intensifier can get you into trouble.

There are far too many people who wish to “unpack”an idea. There is nothing wrong with the original metaphorical use but it is becoming clichéd. I am sick of people looking for “closure”.

To “impact” something:This will impact the community badly. Again there is nothing wrong with this. Any noun can make the change to functioning as a verb, and, used in this way, it is more striking than “have an impact on”.On linguistic grounds I really can’t fault it. I just don’t like it.

What some people would like me to hate is all new words that they happen not to have adopted in their own lexicon. I don’t hate jargon, although I do hate jargon used inappropriately.

Jargon words are those used by a group of people who have a common interest or field of study.  They are a necessary shorthand for communication among people who travel the same linguistic terrain frequently.  Who wants to say “the spreading of a false rumour to manipulate the stock market to one’s advantage” when you can simply say “rumourtrage”.

I notice that “value-add” is among the list of scorned words in the flyer for this evening. It seems to me that “to add value” and “to value-add” are slightly different in meaning. If I add value, I improve something. In the context of a book this is probably an editorial discussion. But if I value-add I improve the content in relation to the price and I know I am in marketing. I think that is a legitimate use of language.

Michael Quinion, who runs the website World Wide Words, commented in his discussion of “wellderly” that; “This collective term for healthy elderly people was noted by Nature in August 2008 as being ‘a term likely to irritate linguistic purists’, though we regularly see many that are worse.”

This is a matter of a language aesthetic. This word was invented by health bureaucrats in the Reagan administration although it was always intended for public consumption, not as bureaucratic jargon.  The wellderly: do you like it?

We wander among the new words saying “Oh I like that”, or “How boring!” or “That’s awful!” in the same way that we would wander along an art gallery admiring or hating the pictures, in the same way that we like and hate clothes, food, music.

Some things don’t appeal because they seem clumsy.  The clumsy ones tend not to survive. There is an inbuilt mechanism in language that says that if something doesn’t work then we all forget it. Or some are boring. The coinage “staycation” is popular with the voters on the Macquarie website at the moment but personally I don’t think it has much appeal. For starters I have never used ‘”vacation” for “holiday”, which shows my age, and then the whole thing seems to require just a little too much explanation – a vacation where you stay at home does not leap from the coinage “staycation”.  “Brain fade” on the other hand is neat.

Some things have visual appeal – “podslurping” attracted the attention of the Word of the Year Committee last year because it summoned up such a powerful cartoon image of the memory stick sucking up the contents of the computer in one slurp. You could see it wiping its lips afterwards.

Some things have aural appeal. Lewis Carroll was an exceptional inventor of sound words:

“Twas brillig and the slithy tothes

Did gyre and gymbol in the wabe.”

Some of his creations have stuck – “chortle” and “galumph”,for example.

Some things are too cute. “Bromance” and the current “man crush” are in that category – or perhaps it is the fabricated emotion that exists only in the glossy magazines that I object to rather than the word for it.

But we would all have our reasons for what we like and what we hate, born of our own experience. And it is one of the great satisfactions of life to be able to say firmly “I don’t care what you say, I know what I like.”