In recent weeks I spent enormous amount of hours watching the well known TED talks. All of them are indeed brilliant but the one that intrigued me most (given my present set of thoughts and priorities) was fascinating talk by Erin McKean called ‘Redefining the dictionary‘.
Erin is truly a language lover who strongly resembles a futuristic librarian-linguist in some 2030 in her red and aquamarine dress. I suppose, though, there will be a very little printed media at that point, since its costly, hard to consume and unreasonably formated. But back to Erin and her talk.
She discussed few subjects including the media consumption, usability of the paper/computer based dictionaries and their limited progress in recent centuries. She also placed a great notation on the “editing” or “revision” dilemma for a dictionaries and luck of proper judgment towards new words. I simply could not resist to add my 5 cents to her thoughts !
Here’s the comment I left on the TED page:
First of all i am throughly reminded of the New Speak in Orwell’s 1984 where the luck of vocabulary was limiting people’s abilities to feel and think. And indeed to keep our-selfs open to new words is the only way to make sure we are not bound to feel and think ‘what we are supposed to’.
secondly, inventing new words takes a great deal of creativity and language knowledge to express one self in such an unstandardized manner. And I will throughly disagree that creativity has ever been something to exclude if it lucked belongingness to a certain classification or acceptable norm.
I believe it is the highest stage of intelligence the ability to create something. Including even such tence subjects as languages.
Confessing that I had a delight of reading JKRowling’s books I will have to disagree to the statement that they are rather ‘non-eruditic’. (that just poked me, sorry..) She uses a great deal of vocabulary, not to mention her frequent introduction of Latin terms in personal or impersonal names.Thirdly and finally, I would say that the whole ‘officially-edited dictionary’ dilemma is based on the media authority principle and consumption/usage of trustworthy content. They are maybe a perfectly trustworthy words but if they are not included it becomes dangerous to express them because of unauthorized content.. but it is rather sad and limited-minded. we don’t like it, now do we ?
**JK remark in comments by one of the participants, which actually made me write that comment, funny enough.
