Businesses around the world are making cuts in staff and services, so should we be surprised that Oxford University Press (OUP) had just made major cuts in their premium product: words? OUP recently made sweeping changes to their Junior Dictionary that have many literary types scratching their heads. Containing just 10,000 words, a rather slim volume even for a children's dictionary, the new word referencer may have undergone an ill-advised overhaul. Gone are the words 'empire', 'monarch','sin', saint, poultry, 'panther', 'goldfish', and 'leopard'. They've been booted and replaced with such gems as 'celebrity', 'blog', 'voicemail', 'chatroom', 'MP3 player', 'tolerant', 'attachment', and 'creep'.
The OUP folks have purportedly wanted to modernize the new Junior Dictionary. But there actions are questionable at best. By removing religiously tinged words, nature words, and words associated with the British Crown, how is it that the Junior Dictionary is more modern? Does religion not matter anymore? Has nature somehow been neutralized in the contemporary world. Are kings or monarchs no longer to be found anywhere on the planet? Though I appreciate the inclusion of "new" words like 'blog' and the like, I'm concerned with the precedent that this may be setting. Will the next Junior Dictionary exclude the words 'journalism', 'press', and 'freedom'? Seriously.
OUP is one of the biggest publishers of dictionaries, so their new Junior Dictionary can have a dramatic. If other publishers follow their lead, what will this mean? Will the adults of tomorrow have lower literacy rates? Will communication channels be downgraded to short-hand? It may sound funny, but when words and their base meanings are suddenly uprooted and discarded, it's not hard to imagine a planet full of shallow individuals with poor communication skills and low literacy rates.
-Amir Said
I find it interesting that they removed the words they did. I think kids in this day and age will still need an understanding of words like "empire" and "monarch", while already having an understanding of "mp3 player"and "blog".
It seems they would have wanted to include words the current generation would not already know.
Posted by: Raquel Wilson | December 21, 2008 at 05:47 AM