NBierma.com > Language > Column > Files
Do-it-yourself-dictionaries don't always have the last word
By Nathan Bierma
"On Language"
Chicago Tribune
July 19, 2006
"The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English" sounds like an oxymoron. If a word is "unofficial," what's it doing in an "official" dictionary?
But to Grant Barrett, author of this dictionary, which is subtitled "A Crunk Omnibus for Thrillionaires and Bampots for the Ecozoic Age" (McGraw-Hill, 412 pages, $14.95), lexicography (the methods of dictionary-making) can be applied to slang, jargon, neologisms and other young or obscure words you won't find in a traditional dictionary.
Barrett is a lexicographer for Oxford University Press and the project editor of the Historical Dictionary of American Slang. The very existence of his new book makes a bold claim about the relevance of published dictionaries and lexicography in the age of the Internet and open-source reference material.
Online dictionaries such as Wiktionary ( www.wiktionary.org ) and Urban Dictionary ( www.urbandicitonary.com ) are examples of lexicography by democracy: they invite readers to create an entry for any word, new or old, and provide their own definition.
At Wiktionary, you can edit an existing definition of a word. At Urban Dictionary, you can vote for which existing definition best describes a word or phrase from street slang, and the top vote-getter is listed as the first entry.
(Another way to get around a dictionary is to go to the Google search engine and type "define: dog," for example, and Google will return a list of sentences on the Web that begin, "A dog is . . . ")
`Legit' words
"I don't know which words are legit and which words are not," the Urban Dictionary's creator, Aaron Peckham, told the New York Daily News in 2004. "I think voting makes it a lot more democratic."
Peckham created his Web site as a computer science student at California Polytechnic State University in the late 1990s. Urban Dictionary now has thousands of entries that were created and voted on by visitors. The slogan on the Urban Dictionary home page says, "Define your world."
Barrett says he loves the fact that so many people are interested in watching and recording words. Urban Dictionary and other Web-only sources are valuable resources for tracking new words and new meanings of words, he says.
"An advantage of online dictionaries is that they can be more up-to-date," Barrett writes at his Web site (www.grantbarrett.com). "Because of the theoretically infinite digital space, online dictionaries can include any word they like, words that might never appear in a print dictionary, or might not appear until years later, since most dictionaries have long update cycles, anywhere from a year to decades."
But do-it-yourself dictionaries have their drawbacks, Barrett says.
"`The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English' has a couple of beneficial characteristics that Urban Dictionary does not," Barrett said in a telephone interview. "For one thing, it was compiled by a professional lexicographer. That means that the words have all been substantiated as real, rather than the figment of a 13-year-old's [imagination]."
One purpose of printed dictionaries in a digital age is to measure the staying power and broader influence of words, Barrett says.
`Words that won't last'
"It isn't necessarily a good thing that online dictionaries can be more up-to-date: They are often merely recording those words that won't last and will never spread," he says.
User-edited dictionaries also lack consistency and detail in their entries, Barrett says.
When you compare entries for the slang word "blaccent" (a combination of "black" and "accent") in "Unofficial English" and Urban Dictionary, you can see the difference. Barrett's definition of "blaccent" in "Unofficial English" is "a mode of speech that is said to imitate African American Vernacular English, especially when used by a white person. . . . This term is usually derogatory." The entry is followed by actual examples taken from Web and news sources dating back to 2001.
At Urban Dictionary, the top definition for "blaccent" is "whites or anyone besides black folks who speak in the `urban style of rappers' and such, when they are around black folks, or around others like themselves."
This definition refers to a speaker rather than the speech. It doesn't tell you the word is derogatory. It gives no examples from Web or news sources. And it uses the vague phrase "urban style of rappers," putting it in quotes, while "Unofficial English" uses the more exact linguistic term "African American Vernacular English."
One telling measure of the dictionaries-vs.-the-Web debate came last year, when Peckham published a book version of his Urban Dictionary site with the same title.
The entries were cleaned up, and all references to vote tallies were omitted. A user-edited Web site turned into an author-controlled book. It was a blow against dictionary democracy, struck by one of its strongest supporters.
Contact Nathan Bierma at onlanguage@gmail.com.
• temporary article link / permanent preview
This article is reprinted in accordance with Tribune Company policies for reprint permissions.
|