4 ms·

Bakers do not bake bread, they merely construct a gel from precursor ingredients. The oven bakes the bread.

hnbad 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_description https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_description Dictionaries do the latter. No need to come up with snarky analogies.
- theodric 4y ago
  Thanks for the Wikipedia links. I have a degree that included a great amount of study of (socio-)linguistics and am well acquainted with the distinction. Describing something in such a way that it furthers an agenda is not objective, nor is it good sociolinguistics, but that's what the dictionary in question has been accused of doing.
  - hnbad 4y ago
    Maybe you should revisit your linguistics course notes then. The purpose of a dictionary is to represent language use. In fact, the definition of "woman" is largely unchanged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33785834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33785834 If your agenda tracks with how language use changes in wide swaths of the population, sure, a dictionary "furthers the agenda" but it does so by accurately reflecting language use, not what you want language use to be. I could argue that the second definition of "Darwinism"[1] furthers an agenda, but that's inane. This is how the word is used and it's the concept I take offense with, not the word itself. The dictionary just represents the reality of that being how the word is used. It sounds like you oppose the notion that "gender" or "gender identity" is, to put it simply, a thing. And you ascribe "an agenda" to those who agree that it is a thing while implying that not acknowledging that many people explicitly or implicitly (i.e. by behaving as if it is a thing without outright saying so, e.g. by respecting preferred pronouns or continuing to refer to someone as a woman or man after finding out they're trans and thus likely don't fit the reproductive definition of those words) agree that it is a thing is absent of an agenda. Actually I'm sure that's not what you're trying to argue because that is clearly ridiculous. Since you explicitly reference an "agenda", I would like you to spell out to me what you think that agenda is and whose it is. Because if you simply meant "bias", it should be obvious that an unbiased dictionary is impossible because it by definition has to represent social biases as there is no objective source of truth when it comes to descriptive linguistics. [1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Darwinism https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Darwinism
rsynnott 4y ago
Eh? No, that's not a reasonable comparison at all. A closer one might be that a food critic does not bake bread, they just observe and moan about it (though even that is probably not a great comparison, because food critics probably can, to at least some extent, ultimately influence the food...) To be clear, the job of a dictionary is to look at which words are being created, which words are becoming obsolete, how the usage of words is changing, and document all that. Nobody (or at least virtually nobody) opens up the new edition of the dictionary and looks for new words to work into conversation; the feedback from dictionaries back into actual English is minimal to null. Incidentally, the reason that the food critic is more influential on the bread than the lexicographer on the language is that people, in quite large numbers, read restaurant reviews as entertainment, but not dictionary entries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_description https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_description Dictionaries do the latter. No need to come up with snarky analogies.

theodric 4y ago
Thanks for the Wikipedia links. I have a degree that included a great amount of study of (socio-)linguistics and am well acquainted with the distinction. Describing something in such a way that it furthers an agenda is not objective, nor is it good sociolinguistics, but that's what the dictionary in question has been accused of doing.
- hnbad 4y ago
  Maybe you should revisit your linguistics course notes then. The purpose of a dictionary is to represent language use. In fact, the definition of "woman" is largely unchanged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33785834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33785834 If your agenda tracks with how language use changes in wide swaths of the population, sure, a dictionary "furthers the agenda" but it does so by accurately reflecting language use, not what you want language use to be. I could argue that the second definition of "Darwinism"[1] furthers an agenda, but that's inane. This is how the word is used and it's the concept I take offense with, not the word itself. The dictionary just represents the reality of that being how the word is used. It sounds like you oppose the notion that "gender" or "gender identity" is, to put it simply, a thing. And you ascribe "an agenda" to those who agree that it is a thing while implying that not acknowledging that many people explicitly or implicitly (i.e. by behaving as if it is a thing without outright saying so, e.g. by respecting preferred pronouns or continuing to refer to someone as a woman or man after finding out they're trans and thus likely don't fit the reproductive definition of those words) agree that it is a thing is absent of an agenda. Actually I'm sure that's not what you're trying to argue because that is clearly ridiculous. Since you explicitly reference an "agenda", I would like you to spell out to me what you think that agenda is and whose it is. Because if you simply meant "bias", it should be obvious that an unbiased dictionary is impossible because it by definition has to represent social biases as there is no objective source of truth when it comes to descriptive linguistics. [1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Darwinism https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Darwinism

rsynnott 4y ago

Eh? No, that's not a reasonable comparison at all. A closer one might be that a food critic does not bake bread, they just observe and moan about it (though even that is probably not a great comparison, because food critics probably can, to at least some extent, ultimately influence the food...) To be clear, the job of a dictionary is to look at which words are being created, which words are becoming obsolete, how the usage of words is changing, and document all that. Nobody (or at least virtually nobody) opens up the new edition of the dictionary and looks for new words to work into conversation; the feedback from dictionaries back into actual English is minimal to null. Incidentally, the reason that the food critic is more influential on the bread than the lexicographer on the language is that people, in quite large numbers, read restaurant reviews as entertainment, but not dictionary entries.