When the Telegraph and the Mail are the only newspapers to cover a story, you can pretty much guarantee that the story will relate to foreigners, multiculturalism and how the country is generally going to the dogs. Today these two papers have very similar articles (here and here) on new words in Oxford Junior Dictionary and the words that have been dropped to make way for them. The papers must be responding to a reader's complaint, as the dictionary is not new; the latest edition of Oxford Junior Dictionary came out in 2007 and it must be this one they are referring to.
On this occasion the newspapers cannot accuse the dictionary of dumbing down, since some of the new words added (and by the way, this dictionary is intended for children aged 7-9) are quite difficult: alliteration, analogue, chronological, dyslexic. Other new words relate to technology: blog, broadband, chatroom, MP3 player. The newspapers (and various parents, head teachers and academics consulted) are most concerned about the words which have been dropped, and I have to admit I am a bit perplexed myself as to why some words are now considered irrelevant to children eg carol, cracker, holly, ivy (surely children must be hearing those words ad nauseam at the moment), as well as blackberry, conker, goblin, hamster, melon, porridge. I would have thought that many of the deleted words still feature in children's vocabulary.
Predictably, the Mail and the Telegraph have emphasised that words relating to Christianity and British history have been dropped (aisle, monastery, vicar, empire, monarch), the implication being it is a left-wing, multicultural plot to destroy life in Britain as we know it. The truth is probably far more mundane. If new words go in to a dictionary, other words have to come out, so that the dictionary stays roughly the same size (and size is an important factor for young children's books). Sometimes it is easy to decide what should go. I updated a children's dictionary and thesaurus a couple of years ago (for Kingfisher) and immediately threw out the now-pejorative 'cripple' (as a noun) and 'retarded' and old-fashioned words such as 'betwixt'. However, there were dozens of words which weren't in the old edition that had to be included in the new one. Children's lives have changed enormously within the past ten years, especially in the areas of family life (words like stepfather, childminder are now more common), clothing (trainers, baseball caps), food (pizza, pasta), leisure activities (skateboard, internet), the environment (recycling, global warming) and school itself (the curriculum is much broader now than it used to be).
Critics tend to assume that children either read dictionaries for fun to learn new words (which they probably don't) or look up words that they meet in reading or in everyday life. In fact, it's older children who use dictionaries to look up the meanings of words; children aged 7-9 tend to use dictionaries to help them with spelling when they are writing out what they did at the weekend, or keeping a diary - typical school writing tasks. Therefore the contents of the dictionary need to reflect children's actual lifestyles, not an idealised picture of how we would all like childhood to be. Words that I myself have not had cause to say in decades eg catkin, colt, nunnery, terrapin, do not belong in a dictionary for seven-year-olds, so the OUP is right to chuck them out of this particular dictionary.
There are many words which have been taken out of the dictionary that I think should have stayed. I have eaten beetroot, blackberries, leeks, parsnips and spinach within the past few days and think they are common foodstuffs, but I might be wrong there - I might be the one with the unusual eating habits. The OUP decides which words to include by seeing which words feature in a children's corpus of millions of words, including the books of popular children's authors Roald Dahl and Jacqueline Wilson. Sadly, those authors are not writing about catkins and spinach!
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