Friday, December 14, 2018
An interesting exercise
I'm busy with a writing project that involves using words according to their historical meaning, rather than the way in which they've been reinterpreted in these politically correct times. to avoid stigmatizing or offending people. There are a great many such words, and by allowing the Social Justice Warrior brigade to redefine their meaning, we're essentially surrendering a very important front in the culture war.
As part of my research, I looked for older dictionaries online, which I could compare to their modern equivalents. A very valuable resource has been Webster's Dictionary. You'll find the original 1828 edition online, as well as the current edition. It's an interesting and informative exercise to look up the same word in both dictionaries, and see how its meaning has changed over 190 years.
Give it a try. You might have fun.
Peter
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14 comments:
Bugger!
This topic causes The Flinstones song to play in my mind ...
We gonna have a gay ole time ... yaba daba dooooo
Sounds interesting!
One of my hobbies is buying old history (and civics classes) books for their take on the Second Amendment.
Of the ones I've bought, it's overwhelming: an individual right. Right up until the SJWs started metastasizing into the schools and history departments.
In the intro to "Mere Christianity" CS Lewis wrote:
"The word gentleman originally meant something recognizable; one who had a coat of arms and some landed property. When you called someone "a gentleman" you were not paying him a compliment, but merely stating a fact. If you said he was not "a gentleman" you were not insulting him, but giving information. There was no contradiction in saying that John was a liar and a gentleman; any more than there now is in saying that James is a fool and an M.A. But then there came people who said—so rightly, charitably, spiritually, sensitively, so anything but usefully—"Ah, but surely the important thing about a gentleman is not the coat of arms and the land, but the behavior? Surely he is the true gentleman who behaves as a gentleman should? Surely in that sense Edward is far more truly a gentleman than John?"
They meant well. To be honorable and courteous and brave is of course a far better thing than to have a coat of arms. But it is not the same thing. Worse still, it is not a thing everyone will agree about. To call a man "a gentleman" in this new, refined sense, becomes, in fact, not a way of giving
information about him, but a way of praising him: to deny that he is "a gentleman" becomes simply a way of insulting him. When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you facts about the object: it only tells you about the speaker's attitude to that object. (A "nice" meal only means a meal the speaker likes.) A gentleman, once it has been spiritualised and refined out of its old coarse, objective sense, means hardly more than a man whom the speaker likes. As a result, gentleman is now a useless word. We had lots of terms of approval already, so it was not needed for that use; on the other hand if anyone
(say, in a historical work) wants to use it in its old sense, he cannot do so without explanations. It has been spoiled for that purpose."
Yep. Find out the real meanings behind all the words "Progressives" have modified in their attempt to take over society.
Like, well, Progressive. Supposed to be forward and better, right? Not so much.
And Liberal. George Washington himself was liberal. He believed in all sorts of things and that people just ought to get along. He was also very progressive and conservative. But he wasn't a leftist. Oh, noooo. Definitely not a leftist.
The SJW's queer everything up.
Sorry, I'm too fagged out to play along. Do go ahead.
I'm arguing with someone over the word "lynch" as I type.
So far it has said that a good human would not use the word (implying that anyone who does use it is evil); assumed that the customs of the US are universal (possibly marking it as a barbarian); and ignored the parts of my defense that it finds inconvenient.
I expect it will go down the rest of Larry Correia's Internet Arguing Checklist shortly.
"Progressive" always reminds me of cancer. Which they are.
The way these various factions continue to keep hijacking common words year after year, decade after decade, the modern dictionaries should have, at the very least, no less than a dozen definitions for each word we use on a regular basis.
And it's not just the modern-day Social Justice fanatics changing the words either
...in the past it was the "hip" crowd and the "cool" people wanting trademark expressions to define their (then trendy) subcultures, or to show they were on to "what's happening".
I would also suggest Grose's 'Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue'. A modern reprint of the 1786 (?) edition is available. Fantastic stuff. What I discovered is that 17th and early 18th Century slang is still current in North America, while faded into the past in the UK. I believe that the lingua franca of the Appalachians would be more understandable to a Chaucer than what is considered appropriate English.
As long as you have a gay time of it!
I've got a card table that's whopjawed. No matter what I do, it's always wobbly.
"You might have fun."
Or, you might end up in this century's book buyers version of "Zane Grey purgatory".
You want to just write books, or do you want to sell them too? Don't think me niggerdly in my praise for your published works to date; indeed my concern is that potential buyers and readers shall be equally dismissive of your efforts as they are of historical documents written with similar regard for the un-repurposed meaning of words forsooth.
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