Newswise — The first day he will confound them: South Dakota State University professor of English and linguistics John Taylor will ask each of his students to bring a favorite dictionary to class.
When some confess they don't have favorites, they don't even own dictionaries, Taylor will point out that Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition, and the American Heritage College Dictionary, Fourth Edition, are for sale in university bookstores everywhere. They're both very good, buy either. Buy both.
"They're shocked when I say you really need them both because they're so different," Taylor said.
"They're not the same. They're radically different books. They're very, very inexpensive, but beautiful products."
Merriam-Webster's is the recognized legal standard in courts of law in America and also uses the International Scientific Vocabulary, or ISV — a natural for students in the sciences. On the other hand, American Heritage gives the Indo-European roots of words — indispensable for students of the humanities.
It's the sort of even-handed endorsement you'd expect from a lexicologist and lexicographer, whose office is packed to the rafters with dictionaries and grammar books, some faintly scurrilous — yes, that is an entire book about the F word, and that is "The Joy of Lex," right there in plain sight.
One treasured item is the 1949 edition of Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition, first published in 1934. When Taylor flops it open, it moves like a spectacular, bruised butterfly that still bears the smudges and thumb prints of hard usage from when it was a library dictionary at South Dakota State.
Dictionaries, Taylor says, are curricular survival tools. Unfortunately, American students nowadays are not inclined to buy dictionaries, let alone read them and wear them out — a trend he believes is related to a disinterest in reading in general and perhaps to a specifically American insecurity about language.
Taylor suggests that nearly every American family traditionally has owned at least three books — the Bible, a telephone directory and a dictionary. The three books are probably still there in most households, but he suspects fewer people read them now.
As it happens, any good collegiate dictionary has a word for that phenomenon. "Aliterates" are those who are capable of reading, but who are not interested in doing so. It's a word Taylor used in the title of his presentation at the Dictionary Society of North America's Biennial Meeting at Indiana University in May 2009: "Teaching Lexicography and Lexicology among the Aliterates."
"According to some of my rural students my office has more books (especially dictionaries) than their school libraries. I can personally verify that, for example, my office does contain more books than the Bison, S.D., High School library," Taylor notes.
"As one of the early groups of boomers born in 1947, I learned how to read before my family had a TV set rooted in the living room. I cannot imagine a day going by without reading a newspaper, reading a slick magazine, reading a book or reading a cereal box. Thus, as I encounter the 'Millennials' or the 'Echo Boomers,' the current labels given to recently matriculated college students, I have had to adjust to the new generation's characteristic lack of interest in reading."
Even his most bright students, Taylor laments, substitute a kind of technological savvy for reading — preferring "the dreary wastescapes of numeracy" to more classical definitions of literacy.
What is particularly devastating, in Taylor's view, is that research published in the National Endowment for the Arts Research Report in November 2007 shows that the age group that used to read the most — Americans between 15 and 34 years of age — now reads the least.
That's a far different world than the one in which, as a Henry High School sophomore in Minneapolis in 1963, Taylor got his marching orders from a Lincolnesque teacher of social studies named William Miller.
"He insisted that we challenge ourselves to become better citizens and one of the best ways to do this, he said, consisted of reading, reading, reading. He urged us to join a "Saturday Review of Literature" program that allowed us to receive a full year's personal subscription for $5 — 10 cents an issue.
"I jumped at the bargain and a year later, having acquired the habit of reading each issue front to back every week, I encountered an article by the David Glixon entitled 'Road Map to the Fields of Learning.'
"In the middle of this article, I read two paragraphs of detailed description comparing and contrasting the Funk & Wagnall's Standard College Dictionary with the Merriam Webster's Seventh New Collegiate.
"The encyclopedic functions of the Funk & Wagnall's received Glixon's positive recommendation. I knew I needed a good desk dictionary in order to prepare for the SAT and, after investing $7.50 (with an extra dollar for the thumb-indexing), I started in at the very beginning with the front matter essays that irrevocably changed my life."
Decades later, Taylor remains convinced that investing in a good dictionary — or maybe two — is absolutely essential for making good students and good citizens. Those who don't read, and don't refer to dictionaries to make sense of what they're reading, are less aware of what's shaping the society in which they live.
"Lexicography is a taxonomic science," Taylor said.
Not only does a lexicographer pin down new words, as a biologist would a newly discovered moth or flower, he or she puts them in a context that helps them make sense of the times. "Blue state" and "red state" are terms that have entered the lexicon in recent years. Those terms would have made no sense to readers a few decades ago.
"Dictionaries are commentaries on the time. It's not only what's there, it's what's not there that's important."
For instance?
The American Heritage College Dictionary, Third Edition, has a picture of O.J. Simpson. The Fourth Edition does not.
While Taylor would love for students to catch the same bug that made him fall in love with dictionaries, he'd settle for students who would use them as the wonderful tools that they are — keys to definitions, pronunciation, spelling. But on that front, he's afraid the aliterates are setting the trend.
As he reported to the conference in May, his students now ordinarily define autobiography by using phrases such as "telling a story about someone's life." He's seen Faustian defined as the name of an old English writer. Occidental characterizes what happens in car pile-ups on Interstate 29. Vicariously has definitions that cluster around "energetic activity," apparently due to confusion with vigorously.
"Cusp means 'to hold very tightly,'" Taylor said. "Empathic means 'to feel bad about something or someone.' Ciphering, one of my favorites, means 'to drain gasoline out of one tank and put it into another.'
"Sometimes three-quarters of a class will define perquisites as 'something you have to take before you take something else.' Pasteurized means 'clean milk.' And, ironically and sadly, for the vast majority of my students, often all but one in a class, disinterested means 'bored.'"
Taylor's disinterested assessment is that his students are demonstrably worse at this now than they were a decade and two decades ago; aided and abetted by hasty technologies that leave no need for riffling pages.
"Implicit in universities' promotion of online, digitized curriculum designed for, and increasingly by, aliterates, the demotion of dictionaries and Gutenberg technology proceeds apace," Taylor said somberly to his colleagues at the Dictionary Society of North America meeting in May.
Not that the future of English is entirely bleak. Taylor admits to being fascinated by error analysis and says it is one of the ways language is constantly changing — adding to, revising, stretching the definitions of words so that some harmless drudge of a lexicographer can make note of the changes.
It's just that this year's errors won't help this year's students pass this year's exams. To do that, they'll need to spend more time using a dictionary. Maybe two.
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