{"id":2792,"date":"2010-11-21T19:54:00","date_gmt":"2010-11-21T23:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2792"},"modified":"2010-11-22T07:42:22","modified_gmt":"2010-11-22T11:42:22","slug":"wordoid-of-the-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2792","title":{"rendered":"\"Dictionary love for Palin\""},"content":{"rendered":"

There was some grumbling on the American Dialect Society list last week after the New Oxford American Dictionary announced<\/a> its selection of refudiate<\/em> as Word of the Year (like Christmas decorations, these days the WOTYs go up before people have even ordered their Thanksgiving turkeys). The choice was a blatant publicity stunt, some said, and besides the word wasn't coined by Palin — indeed, it wasn't a coining at all, but a mistake. As Jonathan Lighter put it, \"It's a gaffe no matter who uses it… So it isn't a good word for a serious dictionary to lionize, if you ask me.\"<\/p>\n

But others defended the choice in the name of fair-&-balanced even-handedness. Ron Butters, a sometime NOAD consultant, charged<\/a> that the critics were being selective:<\/p>\n

So [the NOAD editors] are whores when they jump on Palin's word but not whores when they promote \"truthiness\"?…Why does it really matter that she misspoke–and was clever enough to make a virtue of it–whereas the \"truthiness\" people set out to find fame by promoting a stunt word… [Anyway] if linguists really believe that whatever it is that the people choose to say is OK–if we are really opposed to prescriptivism and proscriptivism–then how can we object even to a dictionary reporting a usage from a source that millions of Americans admire and respect, whether it is a right-wing entertainer such as Palin or a left-wing-beloved entertainer such as the truthiness guy?<\/span><\/p>\n

Is any of this worth bothering about? Not for its own sake, but it foregrounds a paradox that runs deep in modern lexicography<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

No one doubts that the purpose of these WOTY announcements is to get ink (or \"ink\"), even for those, like the ADS, who don't have anything to sell. And on the face of things, the choice was a PR win. The story was picked not just by the standard news media, but by sources from Politico<\/a> to TheStreet.com<\/a>. NOAD even scooped Paul Payack's \"Global Language Monitor,\" an entity that exists with no other purpose than to get its name into the newspaper. Refudiate<\/em> came in fourth on Payack's list (spillcam<\/em> was first), suggesting a rare lapse of PR savvy.<\/p>\n

Still, no one doubts either that the WOTY designators take a delight in announcing their selections. Lexicographers and linguists are inveterate word-watchers, whose hearts beat faster whenever some new lexeme swims into their ken. And so much the better if it's the result of one of those processes that transcend the routine operations of word-formation — a blend, a folk etymology, a portmanteau, an analogy, a loan, an eggcorn, or an onomatope. (Those processes are responsible for six of the ten words on NOAD's WOTY shortlist: crowd-sourcing, vuvuzela, webisode, bankster, gleek<\/em> and nom-nom<\/em>, \"an expression of delight when eating.\") So it's understandable that they should want to bring out the gems of their collection every year for a nonjudgmental show-and-tell.<\/p>\n

But who's kidding whom? At some level, the people at NOAD had to know perfectly well that the chief interest of the story was that a dictionary — and mind you, an Oxford<\/em> dictionary — had singled out the item, with all the implications of offical approval. (I think of CNN's headline when the OED announced that \"doh!\" would be accorded an entry back in 2001: \"Doh! Homer is an English Classic.\")<\/p>\n

True, the editors made it clear that the selection of refudiate<\/em> didn't mean the word would be included in the dictionary. But journalists aren't known for paying much attention to the small print, particularly when it's likely to consign the story to the bottom of page 23 with no run-over. It was entirely predictable that everyone would treat the selection as an honor, under headlines like \"Sarah Palin Word Scores Dictionary Praise,\"<\/a> \"Palin's word-coining gets double honours,\"<\/a> \"Palin Exonerized by New Oxford American Dictionary,\" <\/a>\"Sarah Palin's bad vocabulary validated,\"<\/a> and \"Embracing 'refudiate.'\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Bloggers and blog commenters interpreted the selection as an honor, too, wherever they were coming from politically. On the left, people were indignant that NOAD would bestow its approval on a gross illiteracy, with some suggesting a political agenda and others just an abdication of lexicographical responsibility:<\/span><\/pre>\n
This has to be a joke. Absurd. Would be interesting to see who's running the show at the OED.<\/span><\/p>\n
Wow. Enshrine the ignoramus and call it good.<\/span><\/p>\n
So when did Rupert Murdock buy Oxford University Press?<\/span><\/p>\n
The New Oxford American Dictionary staff has finally come out of the closet, and its members are Republicans, fringe Republicans. They care more about promoting a political buffoon and her regional gibberish than promoting the English language as used by intelligent people…. I will no longer look to the NOAD for guidance in speaking and writing the English language.<\/span><\/p>\n
If one is going to lower their standards and expose their ignorance, it's going to be New Oxford American Dictionary for embarrassing themselves for adopting a word that's made up. The publishers are probably Republicans, hence the spectacle.<\/p>\n
One of the great engines of dumbing down the English-speaking world for the last fifty years has been our dictionary makers. Around 1960, they dropped their traditional role of trying to guard traditional correctness in usage, and opted for a newly democratic role of legitimizer of any dumb, erroneous usage ordinary people actually indulge in, in their hapless illiteracy.<\/span><\/p>\n
On the right, most applauded the selection as a vindication of Palin's usage (though there were a few eyes raised heavenwards in the general direction of William F. Buckley):<\/p>\n
She made a typo on twitter and the jackasses on the left had a field day. But who laughs now that \u201crefudiate\u201d is the Word of the Year as determined by the people who produce New Oxford American Dictionary?<\/span><\/p>\n
Sarah Palin is now in a class with William Shakespeare; one who has coined a word in the English language that has a uniquely new precise meaning that did not exist before.<\/span><\/p>\n
The lefty elite have been saying she is mangling the English language, instead she is expanding it… Funny<\/span><\/p>\n
And in another coup over her critics, Palin's use of the word \"refudiate\" won the endorsement of a decidedly academic crowd. <\/span><\/p>\n
Everything she touches turns to gold. She just got a word into the New Oxford American Dictionary. Freaking unbelievable.<\/span><\/p>\n
And in a demonstration of the principle that conscience makes descriptivists of us all, one commenter at National Review<\/a><\/em> took the occasion to accuse liberals of hidebound purism and moral absolutism:<\/p>\n
How do liberals think words enter the English language, or any other language for that matter? WFB often quoted one of his professors who said that in language there are no rules save that of usage. We're not dealing with moral absolutes here.<\/span><\/p>\n
You could take this all, of course, as just one more confirmation of the public's failure to understand that the dictionary is simply \"a record of the language,\" as lexicographers have always liked to say. But dictionaries never record the language indiscriminately. When I look up a word like repudiate<\/em>, I expect to find a definition based on the usage of the people that the eighteenth-century philosopher George Campbell<\/a> called \"authors of reputation,\" a group which might include William F. Buckley or George Will, but which does not include Palin or Glenn Beck (you can supply your own equivalents on the left). At a certain point, of course, an unauthorized usage can become so widespread that it has to be acknowledged —  mitigate<\/em> for \"militate,\" for example, or infer<\/em> for \"imply\" — but here you expect to see some monitory note or label, or the dictionary isn't doing right by its readers.<\/p>\n
That is, it's the business of the dictionary to confer legitimacy on some sources and some usages and not on others. If it didn't, it would fail its readers. When it comes to the interesting or important words, that is, the dictionary is never a record of \"the language,\" but only of the way it's used by a certain set of its speakers. That set changes from one word to the next, of course: the people whose usage is authoritative in defining ironic<\/em> or repudiate<\/em> aren't the ones you'd go to to find out the meanings of annuity<\/em>, prefix<\/em>, or bling<\/em>, and it's an important part of the lexicographer's job to link words with their proper authorities and subdiscourses. But historically, the items that are crucial to the dictionary's symbolic role are the descriptive or evaluative terms which play a central role in our discourse and which we look to linguistic rather than technical authority to define for us: words like vilify<\/em>, traduce, simplistic, ironic, figurative, admonish, representative<\/em>, infer<\/em>… and repudiate<\/em>. If a dictionary doesn't do justice to these words, no other features can redeem it.<\/p>\n
So it's no wonder that people are alarmed when a reputable dictionary seems to be anointing Sarah Palin's usage as a worthy precedent for a new word in this category. Refudiate<\/em> is very different from Obama's \"wee-weed up,\" whose inclusion might be seen as trivializing the dictionary (which is what people might say about items like doh<\/em>), but not as compromising its claim to semantic authority.<\/p>\n
Now the NOAD people would say that selecting refudiate<\/em> as a WOTY candidate has nothing to do with legitimating it as a usage or even as a word. But the premise of the NOAD's list of candidates is that these are items the editors have circled as they were trolling for potential new entries. Indeed, in their disclaimer they explained that they had \"no definite plans to include 'refudiate' in the NOAD, the OED, or any of our other dictionaries,\" with that coy \"definite\" implying that they weren't averse to kicking the idea around. And by way of justifying the item's potential candidacy, they announced that they had determined that it was in fact a genuine word with an independent meaning:<\/p>\n
From a strictly lexical interpretation of the different contexts in which Palin has used \"refudiate,\" we have concluded that neither \u201crefute\u201d nor \"repudiate\" seems consistently precise, and that \"refudiate\" more or less stands on its own, suggesting a general sense of \"reject.\" <\/span><\/p>\n
In other words, far from merely \"mashing up 'refute' and 'repudiate,'\" as the NY Times blogger Nick Bilton put it (see \"A Palin Flub Becomes a 'Word of the Year'\"<\/a>), Palin had discerned a hitherto unnoticed semantic gap in the language — the absence of any word that expresses \"a general sense of 'reject'\" — and deftly coined a new lexeme to fill it.<\/p>\n
That wording alone tells you that the editors are thrashing here: \"a strictly lexical interpretation of the context\"; \"consistently precise\" — those are the kind of phrases a desperate linguistics undergraduate tosses out on an exam in the hope they'll catch some favorable wind. And the fact is that nobody, the NOAD editors included, believes for a moment that Palin coined refudiate<\/em> as a deliberate blend (after all, she herself disowned the item at first before retroactively claiming it as an invention in the course of embardening herself). And from a \"strictly lexical interpretation of the context,\" whatever that may be, it's clear that she meant to ask \"peaceful Muslims\" to repudiate the mosque, which they were in a position to do, rather than to reject it, which they were not.<\/p>\n
In fact repudiate<\/em> and refute<\/em> make for an awkward blend, since they presuppose different relations between the subject and the object. You repudiate the positions you are associated with; you refute the arguments of your antagonists. I can refute Pullum and Zwicky's theory of cliticization, but the best they can do is repudiate it. (People who try to demonstrate the usefulness of the blend usually wound up surreptitiously switching subject NP's: \"We need a word that captures and conjoins the meanings of refutation and repudiation,\" Bill Kristol wrote<\/a>; \"To save the country from the ravages of contemporary liberalism, we have to refute liberal arguments and see liberal politicians repudiated at the polls.\")<\/p>\n
Now NOAD's editors certainly didn't have any political motive in any of this. Actually, I doubt it even occurred to them that their choice of refudiate<\/em> would be interpreted not just as legitimating the term, but as vindicating its utterer — and my guess is that for all the wide coverage they got, their PR people weren't happy to see people associating the dictionary, quite unfairly, with the political right. What drove the editors to disingenuousness, rather, was the need to square two sometimes antithetical commitments. On the one hand, there's the anti-authoritarian, all-welcoming\u00a0logopandocy<\/a> that's implicit in their naturalist enthusiasms for the queer and curious. On the other is the authoritative responsibility with which people invest their dictionary and which pays their way — and which has been intrinsic to the project of lexicographic description since the eighteenth century. Or to put it more simply: they wanted to give pride of place to an utterance that had briefly turned lexical analysis into a partisan sport (a brilliant blend? an illiteracy?), but in so doing, they were obliged to come down on one side of the debate, and whether they intended to or not, to legitimate the item as a real word with a real meaning.<\/p>\n
Anyone who has worked in lexicography has to be sympathetic to the problem. It was a conflict I was always having to come to grips with when I was writing usage notes for the American Heritage <\/em>Third Edition and I kept find myself saying things like \"A great many people say such-and-such, and really it's perfectly natural, but it doesn't have authoritative precedent on its side and some people get shirty about it, so prudence recommends that you shine it on.\" I have the feeling that this tension between the prescriptive and descriptive imperatives of lexicography is unavoidable; it's constitutive of the whole enterprise. Though there are times when it's advisable not to foreground the contradictions quite so dramatically. In retrospect, the NOAD people should probably have gone with gleek<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There was some grumbling on the American Dialect Society list last week after the New Oxford American Dictionary announced its selection of refudiate as Word of the Year (like Christmas decorations, these days the WOTYs go up before people have even ordered their Thanksgiving turkeys). The choice was a blatant publicity stunt, some said, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language-and-politics","category-semantics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2792"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2792\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}