2009 01 25 - ban Webster's!

I love words. I respect words. Unlike most americans, I think words actually mean something and that they should be used as accurately as possible. One of the lovely things about English is that there are soooo many words, and shades of meaning (nuance) are available in English that don't really translate to a lot of other languages. I don't much care for the sound of a lot of English, the Romance languages are so much more musical than the Germanic, and Odin knows that spellings in English are a bloody nightmare for foreigners and americans alike. I love having the ability to shade a sentence to the exact degree I want. Synonyms are our friends! Having lightened up a lot to move here, I don't have my Oxford dictionary, I don't have a thesaurus or two, and I find I miss them. So, I've been trying to find on-line sources. I came across one the other day that really pissed me off.

Thesaurus.com appears to be a partnership between something called askmenow and Merriam-Webster, now a disgraceful part of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Noah Webster started a 'dictionary' in the late 1800s that tried to restrict American English to biblical sourcing. Over the years, it developed into an American institution, eventually becoming the reference source for well-respected newspapers like The New York Times. Unfortunately, it has been edited by idiots to the extent that it now has definitions that completely warp the language I love. Today's word of the day on thesaurus.com was 'unconscionable', which they Websterised (read: bastardised) into meaning "lacking conscience". I was, not to put too fine a point to it, astounded by the stupidity of this definition, and with the lack of decent editing employed by both of the companies involved. 'Unconscientious' would be closer to the definition offered, as conscientious means taking care to do something with accuracy and .. well .. care. Unconscionable means something that shouldn't be thought of, as in, "an unconscionable size, amount, or length of time is too great and is unacceptable" (Cambridge Learner's, on-line). I wanted an alternative to 'oral' in the sense of in the mouth, and the returned list of synonyms was equally unconscientious as it took the time to note that 'oral' means "spoken" and that 'verbal' means "either spoken or written". So, not only did they ignore synonyms meaning 'in the mouth', they Websterised the usage of 'verbal' into nonsense. If the editors have ever heard the phrase 'a verbal contract is not worth the paper it is written on', they probably think it refers to substandard paper supplies.

Growing up in Canada, where the official spelling is British but the informal usage accepts American spellings, I've forced myself to accept shite like jewelry instead of jewellery, but this goes way beyond differences in spelling. For any of you still confused, oral is a synonym for verbal and vice versa, and neither refers to something that is written down. The point is that words represent things, sometimes concrete things, and pretending that verbal can mean two contradictory things at the same time is not merely confusing to students of English, it is down-right wrong. The current direction of American usage seems unrelentingly towards useless: impacted does not mean 'that which happens when two things hit one another'. Webster's is at the forefront of the dumbing-down of English usage. I didn't know of the connection between thesaurus.com and Webster's or I wouldn't have bothered to use it. I don't expect useful help from the dictionary that gave us 'dord' and took something like fifty years to realise that they'd made a printing error.

P.S. - this site must be using Webster's as its dictionary: I had originally typed Meriiam instead of Merriam and it didn't catch the typo.