Why Dictionaries Still Define Us

New York Times

a day ago

Have you ever obeyed the suggestions of a digital writing assistant to replace a word or restructure a sentence without knowing how, why or even if it made your writing better? Before the reign of digital tools, you'd probably have turned to a dictionary for the same assistance. Our parents and grandparents picked up a heavy book and looked up what words meant, how they're used, maybe glanced at their etymology — and then made a linguistic choice, however shaky or idiosyncratic, to express their ideas.
In today's universe of spell-check, autocorrect and artificial intelligence — each of which is capable of making those choices for us — why should we keep producing and owning actual, cinder-block-sized dictionaries?
Because dictionaries enable us to write not with fail-safe convenience but with originality and a point of view. While A.I. assistants manufacture phrases and statements so writers don't have to think them up, dictionaries provide us with the knowledge to use language ourselves in expressive and potentially infinite ways. They place choice — and authority — literally in human hands, forcing us to discover how we want to explain ourselves and our ideas to the world.
Dictionaries aren't merely long lists of words and meanings; they're also instructions for how best to use those words. Since the debuts of Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster, English dictionaries have reflected the language of particular populations — the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster don't quite say the same things. Simultaneously, by codifying the meanings, uses and connotations of words, those same dictionaries have shaped language. Lexicographers look to the public to determine words' meanings, and we in turn look to lexicographers to verify that our understanding of words is shared and mutually understood. The parameters of English are formed both top-down and bottom-up. Dictionaries amalgamate and standardize these two linguistic influences and, in doing so, define our most fundamental cultural medium.
Standard English doesn't exist today the way it did as recently as the late 20th century. Thanks to the colloquial tone of ubiquitous internet-based communication, formal English has become essentially absent from most people's lives. Where my parents' letters to friends and colleagues would have adopted genial but brittle tones and structures, the vast majority of my social and professional correspondence is informal. Smartphone messaging conventions — like using exclamation points to indicate pleasant normalcy and ellipses to evoke impatience or indifference — routinely seep into follow-ups from artists and lawyers alike. It's almost as if the more informal one's writing is, the more capable, authoritative and trustworthy it reads.
This acceptance of vernacular in contemporary mainstream English is new, but by no means uniform. English-speaking societies have always used an array of dialects, but until relatively recently, lexicographers arbitrarily viewed nonstandard Englishes as unsophisticated and therefore unworthy of regular inclusion in dictionaries. Today there is a general awareness that particular nations, for instance, speak not one but a group of different Englishes. Dictionaries are therefore no longer confronted with the task of defining a prestige dialect but rather with describing and legitimizing the contrasting ways people use words, a task for which they, unlike less deliberate digital alternatives, are well suited.
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