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WILLIAM C. STOKOE bout three months ago publication of a new edition of a dictio- ...,........._ nary was a major news story. Editors and reviewers had their moments on talk shows. Someone even managed to set up an interview with the granddaughter of the scholar who edited the original Oxford English Dictionary. Yes, a dictionary made headline news. With all that is going on in the world these days, you may wonder why all that fuss about a word book? Why spend expensive broadcasting time on something that sits on a shelf in the reference room of libraries? One answer to that question is that a serious dictionary is a lot more than a word book. It is not just another reference work collecting dust in a corner of the library. A serious dictionary is an important matter, and the Oxford English Dictionary is surely the most serious-as well as the largest-dictionary in the world. By defining hundreds of thousands of English words in phrases and sentences of English, it describes this language more completely than any other single book can do. By quoting the passage in which a word was first used and by quoting other examples of its use as the meaning has changed, the Oxford English Dictionary also presents a rich history of the language and a history of the users' thought. That is why publication of a serious dictionary makes news. Between the covers of a serious dictionary we find, all ready for use, the tools of thought. Any language is shaped and formed-in a sense, created-by the thinking of the people who use it. And this works both ways. Language, as a serious dictionary sums it up, is what its users must have with which to do their thinking. And certainly a serious dictionary, or a new edition of one, makes news because it records advances in thinking: New words equal new ideas; new ideas equal new words. The words and the ideas are inseparable, and a serious dictionary is the place where they are arranged for our convenience in looking them up. Without serious dictionaries we would be at a tremendous disadvantage. When we want to point to the foolishness of some activity, we say that those doing it are "reinventing the wheel." Without serious dictionaries of our languages, all of us would have to reinvent the wheel, and just about everything else, over and over again. You may have noticed that I keep qualifying the word "dictionary." I'm talking here about serious dictionaries, the kind of dictionaries that lists the words of a language and tries to define them by using other words of that language. A serious dictionary is about language and not just words. Sure, you can buy pocket calculators now that have keyboards and displays like a TDD. These toys let you key in a word of English and then display a word to translate it in the language of the country you are visiting, e.g., plug in the German language chip and key in "railroad station" and up comes "Bahnhof." 332 THE DEAF WAY ~ The Study of Sign Language in Society Too many sign language books have been ink and paper versions of these cute little pocket toys. The Gallaudet library is full of books that list English words and after each word tell you in words or photographs or drawings how to make a sign with your hands that is supposed to translate the word. This kind of thing is not a serious dictionary. The pocket translator or the word-sign book may have some limited uses, but they are really just toys. My three-year-old grandson had a toy lawn mower that he used to enjoy pushing around while his father was mowing the lawn, but you and I know one thing for sure, and now he knows it, too: That toy never cut any grass. What I hope you will remember from the following papers is that a serious dictionary of a sign language can do as much as other serious dictionaries do. It can describe and arrange the tools of thought that signers of that sign language use and need. But a serious dictionary of a sign language can do something more. It can show the world that deaf signers can think in their sign languages, with logic and precision and even elegance . It can wipe out, as nothing else can so well, the false ideas that ignorant...

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