CSotD: Desperation meets blind ambition
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Matt Bors salutes the ignorantification of America.
When this story broke, my reaction was that it was a sign of how badly things are going for hard-copy reference works like the Oxford English Dictionary, whose mass-market spinoff edition had apparently slipped a cog in this brazen display of media-courting. I used my OED just last week, but specifically to write a polite-but-authoritative response to a language snob who had objected to my use of the word "alright," which most certainly does exist, and, if you are referencing the Who's classic album, is as necessary as is the variant and archaic spelling "compleat" when referencing Isaac Walton.
(I note that there is a movie with nearly the same title as the Who album, except that the movie is "The Kids Are All Right," which, given that the title refers to two kids, should have been called "The Kids Are Both Right," or, if they meant that the kids should not be a cause of concern and there were any desire for clarity, or if they meant to reference the album, "The Kids Are Alright." I assume that the desire of the filmmakers was not clarity or historic accuracy but rather to avoid notes from language snobs.)
In any case, citing a word that was only used once in earnest, and then only quoted afterward in mockery, is both pathetically desperate and tactically stupid. This announcement doesn't mean they've added it to the dictionary, mind you, but it does mean that they'd rather latch onto the Palin publicity coat tails than make an intelligent comment on language. I hope they don't honestly think any of her fans are going to pay $295 a year to look up words on-line in the OED, or $995 for a hard copy, but I'd also be a little surprised if they sold them very many of the lesser spinoff at its cover price of $60, or even discounted to $29.67 at Amazon, since they've put it online for free.
That's not entirely a slap at Palin fans. I don't know any individuals who would pay for access to the OED. For my part, I've got two excellent dictionaries — the "shorter" Oxford, which is only two fat volumes, and a huge Webster's, each of which I inherited from a different grandfather. Both dictionaries are a good deal more than a half-century old, but so am I, and if I need to know when a word entered the language, I can probably remember the birth of the ones that aren't in either of them.
I note that Bors apologizes to his copy editors in the margin above. Heh. Copy editors are the worst snobs of all, because they actually believe a dictionary is prescriptive rather than descriptive, and they even have meetings where they come up with idiotic justification for further gelding the language, for instance, declaring the term "in lieu of bail" to be jargon that nobody can understand, and forcing reporters to write that someone was "jailed because he could not pay $5,000 bail," which is less clear and solves a problem that existed entirely in their own minds. Copy editors have only this year decided that "website" doesn't have to be written "Web site." Good copy editors get promoted and become editors who don't understand comics because humor isn't rigidly logical.
Here's a really funny, authoritative website for those who object to language snobs. Predictably, it only gets "yes, but" responses from true snobs: "Yes, perhaps Jane Austen wrote like that, but my eighth grade English teacher taught us … " I would say, however, as someone who makes a living through proper use of the language, that this where one crosses the line between being a snob and being a snot. Austen was not writing in Middle English and she certainly wrote modern, proper English more elegantly than your teacher. Or nearly anyone else, for that matter.
It is as futile to point this out as to note that, when George Bernard Shaw originally created the character now enshrined as the Patron Saint of Language Snobs, he was a heartless, nasty, unimaginative, overeducated boor. Lerner and Lowe cleaned him up to make him merely a curmudgeon, and then the movie version softened him up yet again, to the point where he became nearly loveable.
Garn.
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