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A Florida school district has literally banned the dictionary in an effort to comply with Gov. Ron DeSantis‘s ® book-banning law.
The Escambia County School District has reportedly removed over 2800 books from library shelves as they undergo a review process that will determine if they are inappropriate for students, according to Popular Information. Among the books currently relegated to storage are The American Heritage Children’s Dictionary, Webster’s Dictionary for Students, and Merriam-Webster’s Elementary Dictionary.
The district contends these texts could violate H.B. 1069, which DeSantis signed into law in May 2023.
My point, which I guess I didn’t state as explicitly as I needed to, is that the entire linguistic premise of newspeak in 1984 is essentially nonsense. Language simply doesn’t work that way, and people’s understanding of words does not generally derive from dictionaries.
To pose a simple question to you, of all the words you know, how many of them did you learn by consulting a dictionary? Or perhaps even more simply, how many times have you looked at a dictionary in the past year?
For the vast majority of people, the answers are “a tiny fraction” and “single digits”.
When I was a wee lad reading something I would ask my parents what words meant and we would look it up in the dictionary. Eventually I just did it by myself so the answer to your question is “most of them”. I haven’t had to check my dictionary for some time recently but my Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary is still in a prominent place in my bookcase, right next to my Roget’s II.
Given that dictionaries are a relatively recent development in history, and yet people did manage to speak English, I can guarantee you that ‘most of them’ is a massive over-estimate.
To be clear, I’m not trying to imply that dictionaries aren’t useful or that them being inaccessible is a good thing, but the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of people’s linguistic knowledge is learned unconsciously through context and simply talking and hearing other people speak.
Just to throw it at you, of your first sentence there:
I would essentially guarantee you didn’t learn any of those words by looking them up in a dictionary, and you probably knew them all before you could even read, with the exception of ‘dictionary’.
Just to chime in here again to you and the person you’re replying to. Maybe you can both lament with me. I learned many words the same way, having a parent that would grab a dictionary, and I do the same thing as a parent.
Let’s take a second to pour one out for the words we learned serendipitously, just flipping through the dictionary for fun, or an encyclopedia, or just the library stacks.
In so many ways, search engines, algorithms, and memes have robbed us of this.
Yeah you never forget your first Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.
I get where you are coming from, I do not think the people you are talking about have the mental aptitude to comprehend the problems with the book 1984, hence they would think it would be a good blueprint for control.
I think you’ve confused how often average people consult a dictionary with how often working professionals do.
My point is that not having access to a dictionary does not massively reduce one’s ability to learn their own native language, not that dictionaries aren’t useful.
I actually majored in Linguistics and will eventually wind up doing a Ph.D in it because I’m a horrific nerd. I love dictionaries and consult them literally every day for etymology information. That doesn’t change the fact that, as I said, the absolute vast majority of someone’s linguistic knowledge of their own native language is gained by observing the language used in context, not by explicit lookups in a dictionary. You don’t teach a baby to speak by throwing a dictionary at it; you just talk to it and they figure it out.
I agree. Kids are sponges. They learn by hearing.
My youngest was 16 months old and I swear I was having full kn conversations with her. She couldn’t speak, but she could gesture and match my tone. She clearly understood just about everything I was saying.
I’ve always liked linguistics. Delved into very superficially in law school in the context of statutory interpretation. Plenty of legal people have written a ton about it, but I found the linguistic analyses very interesting.
Anyway, since you majored, I’m still not really clear on what you mean by how the newspeak in 1984 is not realistic for dystopian predictions (summarizing) because it’s not how linguistics work. Can you elaborate?
It’s like with war and how the victor writes the history of it; the victor might also write the dictionary by shaping the majority lexicon. Part of the fascist toolkit is coopting language to prevent subjugated people from having the tools to resist.
All this don’t say gay, don’t say trans stuff, book bannings, in the south. The attacks on critical race analysis. They didn’t their slaves how to read or write either, let alone how to organize a vote drive or something.
Unless I misunderstood you, what is so inherent about linguistics that stops a fascist from redefining a word or obfuscating it’s original meaning (in the mind of its hearer (forgot the term for this)) to serve a political end?
I’ve gotta dash, but essentially, the fundamental linguistic premise behind 1984 is this idea that, if people do not have a word to describe a thing, then they cannot meaningfully think about it.
This is, to put it simply, just not true. The greater concept is called linguistic relativism, or the theory that specific languages play a significant role in our general cognition, but outside of some very minor effects, evidence simply doesn’t support it. All human languages are essentially of equivalent complexity, and even in situations where a pidgin is created through language contact, it rapidly re-complicates into a fully developed language.
For a concrete example, the idea is that, by replacing ‘bad’ with ‘ungood’, people’s domain of thought will be meaningfully reduced. The problem is minds don’t actually give much of a shit about etymology. In practice, what would rapidly happen is that ‘ungood’ would come to simply be the word for ‘bad’ just as deeply as the word ‘bad’ is to us. To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, consider the word ‘discover’. When I say it, you might think of a new scientific discovery, an explorer finding new land, or something to that effect. What you probably do not think of is that is quite literally ‘dis-cover’, that is, to undo the act of covering something up. Etymology very rapidly gets disconnected from peoples’ internal sense of a word, and to that end, manipulating it doesn’t really do all that much.
To go back to Newspeak, it’s trivial to re-develop a word for ‘rebellion’ with something like ‘goodthink freeness’, which will quickly be internalized into meaning the same concept. The range of possible thought doesn’t actually get meaningfully reduced.
Have you seen the movie Arrival? This is where I first learned of this.
I talked to a neurologist friend afterward who was convinced of it, along with his M.D. psychiatrist girlfriend. I’m surprised to hear it’s less certain to linguists than to medicine. Unfortunately I forgot the evidence I found so compelling, maybe it was that I had just seen that movie.
Amongst linguists, Arrival is beloved for essentially everything except that one single element haha. Except for the linguistic relativism, it’s actually an extremely accurate depiction of what linguistics work looks like. Of course, it is still a sci-fi movie and so it needs a little magic as well, and I won’t begrudge it for that.
I’m not surprised about your medical friends though. Because everyone speaks a language, they people often thing that this makes them qualified to speak on linguistics, especially smart people.
I don’t want to entirely overstate this though. For instance, if you present people with two shapes, one with a bunch of spikes and the other a more softer blob-like thing, tell them that one of them is called a bouba and one is called a kiki, and ask them to guess which is which, the vast majority of people with call the spikey one the kiki and the blobby one the bouba. So there are some curious inherent effects that language has on our perceptions, but they’re subtle, and absolutely nothing like “you cannot imagine the mere concept of disobedience because you don’t have a word for it”.
I’ve heard of that research. Very cool. Some words definitely do have a shape don’t they. I like the explanation of the 1984 bit.
My medical friends had the understanding that differences between languages in structure and syntax, even like, differences in conjugation, were correlated to physical differences in neuroanatomy. I pictured such things honing out certain neural pathways, and theorizing how it could have the effect of making certain rhetoric or logic more or less natural to learners of one language over another, perhaps. Thinking it might also effect how one might think about and perceive numbers or music.
Ah yeah, I have heard of similar things, particularly with differences in word order (subject-verb-object vs subject-object-verb, for example), and I don’t doubt that there are some minor effects there. Ultimately though, my general understanding of the research is that any effects from this are quite small and don’t really rise past the point of being little curiosities. In the grand scheme of things, all human languages are of essentially equivalent expressive power and all do essentially the same things, even if in different ways. This is perhaps not terribly surprising really, given that they’re all running on the same hardware of a human brain.
I would note that there may be something of an slight over-correction in linguistic orthodoxy with topics like this, since efforts to prove the inferiority and simplicity of “savage” languages was a big effort in late 1800s and early 1900s scientific racism. I remember my professor once showing me a book written by the chair of Harvard’s Linguistics Department talking about how the noble Sanskrit was corrupted by being mixed with too many “Orientals” until it became watered down into basic and dumb languages like Hindi. Hell, the entire theory of the Aryan race originated with linguistics, the term itself originally just being a (ultimately incorrect) term for Proto-Indo-European, the theoretical ancestor language of Greek, Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, Latin, Persian, Sanskrit, and some others, the idea being that any group of people whose descendants became all those great civilizations was obvious the pinnacle of humanity. It was of course noted that Hebrew does not belong to this family. The entire field - along with sociology in general - had a massive course correction after WWII for obvious reasons, and while this does align much closer to the actual truth, it has lead linguists to generally be quite reluctant to ever pursue the idea of any language being “better” in some way than others.