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Defining moments

Thursday, September 20, 2007

“One of the major events of the last half-century” – that’s maybe a hyperbolic assessment from an often rather restrained newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, for something happening today. I for one am happy to go along with it, since the event is the publication of a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

It gains that “Shorter” in its name by comprising a mere two volumes (and a width of 5 inches) - compared with its gigantic parent, the original 20-volume OED itself, which stretches about four feet when you line it up on a shelf

Much, obviously, has changed since the first Shorter was commissioned (in 1902) and assigned to an aptly and touchingly surnamed editor - William Little. The initial pace was stately, as befitted the period; it took not far from a half-century for the SOED to actually appear – in 1933.

Over the latter half of the century things got speedier, with editions Number Two through Five following each other comparatively briskly off the historic presses in Great Clarendon Street, Oxford (pictured above). It’s taken just fourteen years since that last, Fifth edition - and, importantly 2,500 new words clamoring their way in - to produce today's Number Six.

Almost inevitably it is packaged in a garish box that looks like a computer product. More significantly, though, it does in fact come in a CD-ROM version as well as in hard-copy (very hard, and very weighty).

Any dictionary enthusiast (like me - that’s a given) will be drooling over that huge smorgasbord of 21st century usages that have gained fresh entry. It’s hard to pick a favorite – but “bunny-boiler” has just got to be up there (- as inspired by Glenn Close’s character in the movie Fatal Attraction, and defined coolly by the Oxford editors as “a woman who is vindictive after having been spurned”).

But “darknet”, too, has a delightfully sinister, as well as hip appeal - reminiscent of sci-fi villains at work threateningly in monochromatic low-lighting: “a computer network with restricted access that is used chiefly for illegal peer-to-peer file sharing.”

All the same, I have to say "Nollie" is almost too arcane for words. It's a shortened form, probably, of "Nose Ollie". That's a forward-facing version of an Ollie skateboard jump - and for the non-skateboarders among us the editors have to explain that the name derives from "Alan ‘Ollie’ Gelfand (b. 1963), US skateboarder, who invented the jump in 1976". Now we know.

Long affectionately nicknamed around the Clarendon Press with the slightly variant acronyms SOD, COD and POD - for Shorter, Concise and Pocket Oxford Dictionary - all versions of the venerable tome are determinedly the kind of dictionary (in the hard-fought title of the original, dating back to 1879) that is based “On Historical Principles”. Oxford merely describes, it doesn’t prescribe. Its definitions, just like the wonderfully detailed etymologies it offers, are built upon neutral observation, not approval or disapproval.

Some traditionalists may have a problem with the neologisms, or new formulations of the over-familiar (say, “crapola”??) but a very pragmatic rule has guided the editors – their so-called “rule of fives”. That is, if there are five examples in five different printed sources in five years, a word gets in.

I wonder what the five different sources were for the absolute longest word to figure here? It's "Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis" ... and it's defined as “a factitious long word alleged to mean a lung disease caused by inhaling very fine ash and sand dust”.

(Umm, “facititious”? Oh, that’s “made for a special purpose; not genuine; not natural or spontaneous;
artificial”,)

BETRAY … BETRAYAL – STRONG WORDS THAT ARE NEWLY WINNING their own place in the limelight, and of course in the blogosphere (-which according to Oxford is defined as ... Oh, never mind).


First, MoveOn.Org, the aggressive anti-Bush group largely funded by billionaire George Soros, buys advertising space in the New York Times (at a discounted, but probably not partisanly discounted rate). It opines that General David Petraeus in briefing Congress about George W Bush’s “surge” in Iraq, has been acting as General “Betray-Us”. Republican presidential front-runner Rudy Giuliani promptly takes out his own ad in the Times, and on radio in the politically crucial market of Iowa, and lambastes MoveOn.


In that same Iowa market, and then on national cable networks, MoveOn buys TV time to harp again on its favored terminology and accuse Giuliani of a “betrayal of trust”. It presses on to accuse President Bush of – guess what – another “betrayal of trust”


Naturally, the repetitive word-choice is no laziness or accident. It comes following the best, or least pretty well-credentialed, advice.


George Lakoff is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and has become an advisor to MoveOn. Wouldn't you agree every political organization should have a linguistics professor on its staff? Lakoff also wrote a clever anti-conservatives book called Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (from publishers Farrar Straus Giroux).


According to Lakoff, the careful use of “betrayal” announces that a visceral moral question is at issue here, raising even bigger hackles than an accusation of “lying” would. He says: “You have to break through the politeness in order to actually say something real".


Republicans are unsurprisingly furious. Bush’s former spokesman Ari Fleischer, through his group Freedom’s Watch and its $15 million advertising budget, is proclaiming MoveOn’s use of “betrayal” to be “despicable” and “shameful”.


We’re dealing inescapably with just “words, words, words” -- to quote one of the OED’s favorite sources, Prince Hamlet of Denmark. The applicable OED definition that springs to mind here is: “A disproportionate or excessive commotion or display of concern about something”.


The word being … of course … “fuss”.