Get off your high-horse about what words get into the dictionary.
By Alan Winner (Performer, Writer, Director)
Back before we had dictionaries, people changed the spelling of names and words all the time. Sure it must have been a little confusing, yet communication still happened. For centuries, reading was a luxury for the rich who could afford to study. There was hardly a middle class, and the poor just worked incessantly or starved.
Now I see countless posts around the internet bitching about the words that the Oxford dictionary is now including. Words like “jeggings”, “twerk”, and “photobomb”. Shaming people based on the words they use is classist, and we have to stop silencing the direction living languages.
Other new words recently added to the Oxford dictionary include: cisgender, crowdfund, and nanosized. All of these words come from social and scientific progress, and give names to ideas that weren’t in the mainstream until recently.
Demanding that the words you find appealing be the only ones allowed in the dictionary sounds a lot to me like censorship, which, unfortunately, is still widely accepted by those people who are afraid of progress. You don’t get to pick and choose what words other people use, but you can certainly choose to leave them out of your own vocabulary.
Shakespeare introduced 1,700 new words in his plays and poems. 20th Century writers like Burgess and Vonnegut invented words for their stories and were lauded for it. We get so caught up in the here and now, we forget to look back in time.
Words are imperfect tools used to help us communicate thoughts. I’ve often had moments where words aren’t able to articulate what I’m actually thinking. Words are learned, but communication is innate. Babies communicate, people who are mute communicate. The words we include in our dictionaries should include all classes, not just the people who are fortunate enough to attend college.
ALAN WINNER co-wrote and starred in his one-man show The Boy Who Loved Bassey. He is currently writing the screenplay for Kitchen and adapting a new version of Timon of Athens. www.alanwinner.com
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