The Prime Minister’s now internationally famous speech in which she called Mr Abbott on his misogyny prompted Macquarie Dictionary to update its definition of the word. Some people didn’t like this. But dictionary meanings need to reflect how people use words, because that is where the meanings come from.
Defining words is a more complicated process than most people realize. The now late Professor Colin Yallop, a previous Director of the Macquarie Dictionary, wrote:
“It is unwise to assume that meaning is captured in dictionary entries … Dictionary definitions can and should be informative and helpful, and, when well written, they provide a paraphrase of explanation of meaning. But the meaning is not necessarily fully contained or exhaustively captured within such a definition”.
Defining words is a more complicated process than most people realize. The now late Professor Colin Yallop, a previous Director of the Macquarie Dictionary, wrote:
“It is unwise to assume that meaning is captured in dictionary entries … Dictionary definitions can and should be informative and helpful, and, when well written, they provide a paraphrase of explanation of meaning. But the meaning is not necessarily fully contained or exhaustively captured within such a definition”.
It is not, as Professor Yallop noted, that word meanings are “vague or ethereal”. And words “do not mean whatever we want them to mean”. The problem is that dictionary meanings are “distilled from discourse”, and often from “shifting, contentious discourse”.
Here’s an example of the problem. Over dinner one night this week, my son recounted that one of his classmates had been given an “orange card” by the teacher for what seemed to him a trivial matter. The student in question had called another kid a “retard”. My son asked what was so bad about that. “Isn’t that just like calling someone an idiot?” he asked.
Grown ups know that “retard/ed” is pejorative. While the word was first used simply to describe someone with what today we call an intellectual disability, over time it built up negative connotations. This has happened through people using the word. Its evolution, both to become a term of abuse, and now to be something which can get you an “orange card”, tells us important things about our ideologies about disability. Some would like to see it drop out of popular usage altogether. The arguments are pretty compelling: check out http://www.facebook.com/EndtheWord:
Here’s an example of the problem. Over dinner one night this week, my son recounted that one of his classmates had been given an “orange card” by the teacher for what seemed to him a trivial matter. The student in question had called another kid a “retard”. My son asked what was so bad about that. “Isn’t that just like calling someone an idiot?” he asked.
Grown ups know that “retard/ed” is pejorative. While the word was first used simply to describe someone with what today we call an intellectual disability, over time it built up negative connotations. This has happened through people using the word. Its evolution, both to become a term of abuse, and now to be something which can get you an “orange card”, tells us important things about our ideologies about disability. Some would like to see it drop out of popular usage altogether. The arguments are pretty compelling: check out http://www.facebook.com/EndtheWord:
My 9-year-old had no idea of this history, and his classmate, a good kid, did not intend to ‘dis’ the intellectually disabled when he used this word. But you can’t ignore the place a word has in the larger community. You can mean things that you don’t mean to mean. Words are bigger than individuals. This is what makes them powerful.
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