About This Word – an introduction to this feature …
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Wordsmyth is launching a new feature – About This Word” (or ATW) – which is intended to stimulate awareness of how our words are kept alive and stable, or changed – for better or for worse. It is also an invitation for you to participate in this process of word stewardship.
The inspiration for this blog feature comes from a long standing interest in the way languages are created and change – an inherently participatory process. We could as easily talk about “languaging” as “language”. One recent thread – capping a discussion of the word “robot” – highlights this perspective:
“This is how language works. Words get tweaked, re-purposed, misunderstood, munged, combined, slurred, abused, enriched, extended, negated, confused, and broken. It’s very likely you are the only person with your particular perception of any particular word and all of its connotations. But the rest of the world doesn’t care. Life and language move on and evolve with or without your own favorite semantics. You can embrace and enjoy the change or whine and complain, but it will happen. Better to enjoy the ride.”
– skywhopper on Apr 12, 2017 | parent | favorite | on: Robot Is A Hijacked Word
“There’s an option between whining and enjoying the ride, which seems to be missed by descriptivists: to be an active participant in language as a creative exercise. I see these etymological explorations as prime examples of participatory linguistics.”
(samirillian on Apr 12, 2017 [-])
“Except on Wikipedia, where words get disambiguated and wikilinked, slowly encouraging people towards a shared vocabulary and understanding. “(Mathnerd314 on Apr 12, 2017 [-])
(Retrieved April 5, 2020 from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14094204)
The meanings of words arise from their use, and the role of a dictionary is to describe those uses as accurately as possible. Dictionaries summarize the uses that have become stable and recognizable. And the Wordsmyth dictionaries are reliable guides to current uses in our culture. But dictionaries aren’t the only place we find discussions about the meanings of words.
The meanings of our words are being shaped constantly, by being used in different contexts, and for different purposes. But sometimes people step back and discuss how words are used – pointing to the pros and cons of a particular meaning or the connotation of a particular usage. Sometimes the purpose is to clarify a misunderstanding, and sometimes it is to advocate a change in the norm. In either case, a tension appears and we are invited to dive into the creative challenge of shaping the rules of the language game. Some of us respond to this invitation, and in the internet age, more of this dialogue about language is available for us to learn from. So we will focus on the discussions in the media that focus on which words are a better fit (word choice) and the arguments about which word uses (meanings) reflect different values.
In the “About this Word” feature, we want to alert our users to places where these tensions are exposed and creative discussions are occurring. And in our blog we want to provide a place for continuing these discussions, and in some cases, linking them together.
We don’t want to find errors or point to “correct” uses – though many of our citations will do that. Instead we want to point to the many channels for participation in this process of defining words by picking out key features in our collective life, and choosing the words that are most important in conceptualizing this collective life.
We also won’t be contributing directly to standard lexicography. The corpora lexicographers will use need longer timeframes, so the agents and agencies of change can work through their languaging practices.
In newspapers, magazines and many other media, there is a small but a constant drumbeat of articles that ask us to be aware of the twin issues of naming and defining. In order to communicate effectively, we often clarify a meaning in context, or explain and justify the choice of one word over another. When the issues become more serious, these processes of clarification take on a life of their own – the life of “conscious language” or “living language”.
We encourage you to discuss the meanings of these words, as well as the controversies surrounding them, in the comments section of the Wordsmyth blog. We also invite you to send us links to any additional material “About These Words”.
In Part II of this introduction we discuss the two faces of participation through language awareness: discussion of definitions, and conscious word choice. (https://blog.wordsmyth.net/?p=159055)
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