Oxford says “blog” and “broadband” in, “beaver” and “bishop” out.
The new Oxford Junior Dictionary, which caps itself at 10,000 words, has excised a huge swath of words to make room for definitions of “mp3 player”, “broadband”, “celebrity” and “blog”.
Some of the words being cut out include “nun”, “devil”, “bishop”, “almond”, “beaver” and “lobster”, amongst about 150 other words.
Oxford University Press, which publishes the edition, said the book can only be so big, because it has to fit in the hands of a seven-year-old and be accessible to new readers. When words are added, others must be removed.
“We are limited by how big the dictionary can be,” Vineeta Gupta, who heads children’s dictionaries at OUP, told the Telegraph. “When you look back at older versions of dictionaries, there were lots of examples of flowers, for instance. That was because many children lived in semi-rural environments and saw the seasons. Nowadays, the environment has changed.”
This strikes me at a totally misguided effort on a couple of levels. First of all, I think the idea of giving a 7 year old a seriously pared down dictionary is stupid in the first place. When I was 7, I was perfectly capable of flipping through adult sized dictionaries and encyclopedias.
I can’t help but think that kids today would be better served by having a portable device with a full-fledged dictionary built in. I also can’t help but think that many kids today already know how to use google better than their parents, making Oxford itself look more obsolete than any of the words they’ve banished from the child’s lexicon.
[quote from The Globe And Mail]
~I can’t help but think that kids today would be better served by having a portable device with a full-fledged dictionary built in~
You and I already have one; it’s called a Smart Phone. Seriously, I completely agree; why would Oxford even bother putting out a book version of the dictionary anymore? In this age of Going Green, and with every single year bringing yet another report of kids with back problems due to overloaded backpacks, and with the cost of even an eeePC being less than a school year’s worth of supplies, the migration to a digital age of all-in-one dictionaries, thesauruses, calculators, and note pads seems like a no-brainer. It would at the very least prevent situations like this one, in which a child’s scope of accessible knowledge is gimped due to something as asanine as a 10,000 word count.
I’m not sure I agree with the constant assault on kids’ eyes by glowing screens beginning at birth (case in point — the Baby Channel, Baby Einstein…). As a child there was something to be said for lying on my bed and reading a (paper) book. Whenever I’ve read a book online, I’ve felt a distinct disconnection (and headache) that I don’t feel when I’m reading an actual book.
Aside from all that snootiness, though, the reason kids need these books is because alot of schools and parents just can’t afford all the fancy-shmancys we take for granted. And by browsing through an encyclopedia or dictionary to look up specific information or definitions, they come across other words and other bits of information, broadening their vocabulary, encouraging further development of research skills, etc. Being taken directly to the answer of their query sometimes causes children to miss out on all that. Dictionaries are reference books that don’t normally go home with the child, so the whole ‘backpack’ thing doesn’t really apply here.
I don’t believe a child’s scope of accessible knowledge is “gimped” in any way, provided the child’s parents and teachers actually make a joint effort to become actively involved in their child’s education. A dictionary is just a dictionary if children aren’t motivated or without reason to look something up. It’s the same with the internet — if the child isn’t given a reason to look up certain words or subjects pertaining to a lesson plan, then it won’t make a difference whether any of these words are in a dictionary, online or not.
The old cliche of “I google, therefore I am” comes to my mind, which I’m sure would have made poor Descartes cringe. The uncertainty and chaos of Google.com is something education is trying hard to undo. Children have come to rely on unclear (if not banal) definitions as absolutes, taking for granted that the democratic essence of the internet is what makes it so unreliable. To say that Google could in any way replace the value of a good dictionary is facetious if not naive.
Not even at the richest of institutions does every child own some kind of technological device that would do away with the necessity for a dictionary. I think we are forgetting the experience of holding a book, flipping its pages, and sharing it with others. The Kindle may be a glorious device to many, and I myself rely on my iPhone for many tasks, but in no way could either device replace a book for a child. Believe it or not, most children prefer paper because it is tangible and a lot easier to read.
Children, because they have grown up with these tools at their disposal, believe computers are for the most part toys. Trying to use Google as an educational tool has been as useful as telling fart jokes in the classroom. Students are incapable of disseminating information and the validity of its source. As for dictionaries, there’s something to be said when you hold the English language in your hands. In a hard cover dictionary you easily pay attention to the myriad of definitions, whereas Google has taught us if it is not the first three entries, then it is useless. I think children lose part of their sense of exploration of a block of text without a book, because the ads on Dictionary.com bombard them with offers to refinance their mortgage.
Do I think adults need the experience of holding a book? Not necessarily, because we have the foundations (most of us) built upon throughout our education to research, understand, and synthesize information. Without a book, information tends to lose its value. It all looks overwhelming and uniform on the computer. There are no bindings, and children feel no responsibility to cite any work. It’s easy to convince them that the information in a book they hold isn’t theirs, but tell them the same about the information on the net, and they reject the notion.
I believe strongly in teaching using technology, but not in replacing what they learn with technology. The internet is a mode of innovation. We are only beginning to explore the uses for visual dictionaries, so I believe in relying on those tools to expand our old ones. I’m not a stringent, traditional snob, but I do think that if you begin to strip children away from understanding the usefulness of a book, or the importance of words within one, you are entering that world of Fahrenheit 451, in which books are not banned, but ignored and undone by our consumerist need for more, better, faster.
You both raise good points about paper dictionaries, and I fondly remember finding myself flipping around when I would find a definition that contained a word I wanted to look up, leading me on tangents of discovery.
I guess by the same token I don’t remember ever liking kids dictionaries when I was a kid, much preferring the big old 10 pound, foot thick comprehensive one.