Educating the Dictionary User

Educating the Dictionary User w: Charlotte Brewer Hertford College, Oxford Writing not as a practical lexicographer but as an academic who researches lexicography on the one hand, and includes lexicography in an undergraduate course on the history of the English language on the other, I am struck by the naive faith widi which even sophisticated language users approach dictionaries. One issue in particular stands out: how difficult it is for readers /users to assess a dictionary and understand its intended function. This is partly because no one ever reads the introductory material, but also because when someone picks up even a short dictionary and leafs through it, they can feel overwhelmed by the vast quantity of knowledge and scholarship it presents, in a form impossible to analyze or evaluate except on the basis of an individual entry (whose relationship to the whole diey cannot know) . Sometimes diis extensive display of information is enabling. W. H. Auden said that, if marooned on a desert island, he would choose to have with him "a good dictionary" in preference to "the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways," and other poets have found the same: Emerson believed that "neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no cant in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion. The raw material of possible poems and histories" (W. H. Auden, TheDyer's Hand. London: Faber and Faber, 1963; Emerson quoted in die OED entry for didionary). For non-poets, though, the wealdi of linguistic material in a dictionary , organized by alphabetical sequence bizarrely unconnected with Dictionaries:Journal oftheDictionary Society ofNorth America 27 (2006), 139-142 140Charlotte Brewer a word's meaning or its relative significance, can shut off a person's critical faculties—perhaps because it appeals to a deeply lodged belief, or cultural instinct, diat a collection ofwords and their meanings in some way represents, unproblematically, the world itself. The urge to record knowledge, understanding, and natural phenomena in a coherent taxonomy has lain behind the compilation of encyclopedias and dictionaries over many centuries, from Isidore's late sixth century Etymohgiae and its medieval successors through to the opus of d'Alembert and Diderot and subsequent works, and the large size and wide scope of the resulting volumes have often elicited from both autiiors and readers the corresponding view that such reference works faithfully reflect, in some way or other, the world outside them. As die seventeenth century educationalist Comenius wrote, "Encyclopaedia is the system of all sciences, based on method and laid out like the world itself " (quoted as an epigraph to Werner Hüllen's English Dictionaries, 800-1700: The Topical Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999) from Comenius, Lexicon Reale Pansophium). But this implies that lexicographers choose their words in a neutral and unfettered way (or perhaps that the words choose themselves). Nothing could be further from the truth, as all practitioners know. The constraints are numerous and scarcely need mentioning in a journal like Didionariesr. available space in the book (supposing it is a book) in which the dictionary is to appear, in turn determined by publishing costs ofvarious sorts, together with assumptions about the likely buyers; plus lexicographers' time (however paid, or not paid) ; all this in some sort of relation to the editorial limits that have to be imposed in order to make a word-gathering project susceptible of completion (e.g., on scientific , technical, specialist vocabulary, on words no longer current, on colloquialisms and slang, regionalisms, loan words, etc., etc.) . In addition, many dictionaries, even of the language as a whole rather than a specialized subset of it, look for particular market niches: for example, for students (therefore more hospitable to usage comments and technical words), or for specific word-games such as scrabble or crosswords (therefore more hospitable to archaic words) . A historical overview of dictionaries swiftly teaches one both that dictionaries borrow shamelessly one from another, and that die most important thing for any new dictionary is to survive commercially by competing successfully in the marketplace, usually by claiming (rightly or...