Imagine, for example, that you’re reading a Sherlock Holmes mystery from the 1890s. How nice it would be to have a culturally appropriate dictionary to use while you read, a Victorian one that recognizes 1890s slang and brand names. It would help you get more out of the book as you read it and uncover hidden dimensions.
Certain publishers are starting to do this by building limited glossaries into certain enhanced ebooks. These interactive glossaries are seamlessly integrated into the text and pop up with definitions to unfamiliar words or phrases at the tap of a finger. As more and more books get digitized, algorithms will start to mine texts for bits of slang and brand names and other culturally relevant references and automatically assemble them into minimally invasive, dictionary-like resources you can use while you read.
It’s a neat reimagining, in which dictionaries are no longer curated by old men in beards like Daniel Webster himself, arranging index cards for decades into one man’s vision of what a dictionary should be. Instead, the culture creates its own dictionary. And the more content that’s used, the better the dictionary becomes and the more expansive it is.
I can see what people like Erin are doing, and I look ahead a few years to a time when these live online dictionaries replace those embedded in e-readers. I also look forward to a time when such dictionaries perhaps let you see the author’s intent as you read, wavering into and out of focus below the iPad’s shimmery screen.
But would you even use such dictionaries? Perhaps you think dictionaries already get in the way of your reading experience and you’d rather enjoy the flow of the author’s words without interrupting it. Or perhaps you think dictionaries are overkill and we already have enough basic words in our language to use to clearly express ourselves.
A post on xkcd.com presented a plan for the Saturn V rocket but described its components using only the thousand most frequently used words in English. Surprisingly, the description was very readable. There’s no word for rocket, so the caption says, “Fire comes out here,” and likewise the crew capsule is a “people box.” It’s sheer brilliance. Just search online for “Saturn 5 top 1000” to see the full plan in all its glory. And while you’re at it, let me know what you think about the future of dictionaries and words!
Language Change: “Whan that Aprille, with hise shoures soote…”
Lingo S changiN fst 2day. tnk u cn kip ^ W it? gr8. NP.
f nt, ur n 4 a vvv hrd time :(
Our language is changing, and lexicographers are jumping out of their ivory-tower windows.
The English language is no longer managed by an editorial team in the austere offices of Merriam-Webster, Inc., or the Oxford English Dictionary. Believe me, I know. I’ve met with their editors at their offices, and the spirit of the English language had fled. The English language is afoot in the world, and she’s not going to be penned up again.
New words sometimes used to take decades to trickle into the vocabulary, but now that happens faster than a speeding SMS message. We even have words that aren’t, strictly speaking, words. Both n00b and w00t are examples of leetspeak, internet slang that has gone mainstream. One 2012 estimate suggested that 8,500 new words enter the English language every year. Most of these are product names, such as Twitter or iPad.
What will language be like in the future? Will it be some strange hybrid of letters and numbers? Will new words be graced with arpeggios from the extended ASCII character set? Will we find serious works of fiction studded with smiley emoticons? Will the great American novel be written on a teen’s smartphone, one text message at a time, and broadcast live on the internet for everyone to read?
Language change is fundamental and unavoidable. That said, ebooks are accelerating this change. Ebook self-publishing, for example, encourages new words to enter the lexicon faster than ever before. This is because self-published ebooks are usually edited only by the authors and not by traditional editors, a shift in the process that is used at major publishing houses. Unpoliced by vigilant editors, new words from street culture or internet subcultures sometimes slip into self-published ebooks, intrude into the language, and achieve mainstream status.
And this is nothing to worry about.
You see, ebooks will hasten the rapid change in language and aid in its transformation. But let me pause for a moment to explain language change by way of an example.
I was in the hospital recently, visiting a friend recovering from surgery. She was coming out of anesthesia, and I was a little worried. There’s always a rare chance with anesthesia that a patient will die in her sleep. My friend had been out for a long time after the procedure and was finally coming round. As she grogged awake, I asked her if she was okay, and what she said sounded like, well, pure gibberish.
I was concerned, thinking she was speaking in tongues or had some brain damage. So I asked her to repeat it, and she did, slower this time. Still gibberish. I was about to fetch one of the nurses, when my friend finally explained that it was the opening of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and repeated it slowly:
She had memorized the passage as a kid and had recited it to prove to herself that her memory was still intact after anesthesia.
I didn’t recognize that this was Middle English. That surprised me, because I know modern English, and I’ve even studied Anglo-Saxon English. But I simply couldn’t understand what she said. There’s a gulf of centuries between Chaucer and us, and to a non-expert speaking one dialect, the other is unintelligible. I very much doubt that Chaucer would be able to understand our use of English, either, although he’d surely be fascinated.
Chaucer was a contemporary of Gutenberg, and since his time, English has been radically altered and vastly expanded. The Renaissance brought an explosion of Greco-Latinate words into our vocabulary. We can choose whether we want to sound pretentious or smart. We can obfuscate or hide. We can cogitate or think. The older German-tinted English words like “hide” and “think” are still here, but we can use grandiloquent ones too—like the word “grandiloquent” itself. Not only that, but there also has been an explosion of brand-name words, starting in the 1950s. Chaucer would have no idea how to xerox a PowerPoint—he would accuse you of speaking in tongues. Or “spekinde tungen.”
And it’s not just words that have changed. It’s style too.
English has a lilty, singsong quality when spoken. The words go up and down, like a buoy on the waves. You see this in stylized English writing too. But you don’t see it in text messages. And you don’t see it in business-speak.
I’ve suffered through countless Amazon deep dives and read reams of business requirement documents that, if stacked sky high, could be a splinter in God’s eye. These documents are logically organized, efficient, and detailed and yet devoid of the soul and sparkle of the English language herself. That’s ironic, because all of these documents were geared toward the Kindle, toward reinventing reading.
Text messages and the language of corporate documents are just two of many examples of how written English is changing. There’s nothing singsong about these styles. They’re factual and show how English has been bent. Words are reduced to their bare essentials, and sentences are constructed in business-ese to convey information logically and unambiguously. It’s as if we’re writing for computers or we ourselves have become mechanized.