December 22nd 2008
“Blog,” “Celebrity” More Important Than “Saint,” “Chapel”
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f Britain were our civilization, I would post this under “Our Crumbling Civilization,” but thankfully we have gone our separate ways a bit, and as far as I know, this isn’t happening here … yet:
Oxford University Press has removed words like “aisle”, “bishop”, “chapel”, “empire” and “monarch” from its Junior Dictionary and replaced them with words like “blog”, “broadband” and “celebrity”. Dozens of words related to the countryside have also been culled.
The publisher claims the changes have been made to reflect the fact that Britain is a modern, multicultural, multifaith society.
But academics and head teachers said that the changes to the 10,000 word Junior Dictionary could mean that children lose touch with Britain’s heritage.
“We have a certain Christian narrative which has given meaning to us over the last 2,000 years. To say it is all relative and replaceable is questionable,” said Professor Alan Smithers, the director of the centre for education and employment at Buckingham University. “The word selections are a very interesting reflection of the way childhood is going, moving away from our spiritual background and the natural world and towards the world that information technology creates for us.” (U.K. Telegraph)
The removal of natural words – willow, moss, fern, heather, buttercup and the like – seems odd because the deletions seem decidedly PC-driven, but it is PC to be all worshipful of Mother Nature. How are you going to worship a buttercup if you don’t know what it is?
The other changes clearly are designed to rebut the U.K.’s grand history as a Christian, imperialist monarchy. If a child hears about the “British empire” and looks up empire, his or her little head will not expand. If young Colin or Sarah wants to find out what bishops are and what they do in chapels … well, those words might as well be from Mars.
MP3 player is in; Pentecost is out. Voicemail is in; Whitsun is out. (Merriam-Webster can still give you a pretty good run-down on Whitsun if you need it.)
Here’s a list of Christian words that have been removed: Abbey, aisle, altar, bishop, chapel, christen, disciple, minister, monastery, monk, nun, nunnery, parish, pew, psalm, pulpit, saint, sin, devil, vicar. And words from England’s history: Coronation, duchess, duke, emperor, empire, monarch.
Words that are far more important than these, apparently, include: blog, broadband, chatroom, tolerant, interdependent, EU, allergic, biodegradable, donate, endangered and Euro.
Not the least bit surprisingly, the person behind all this binging on the new and purging of the old is one Vineeta Gupta, who seems to personify the publisher’s stated obsession with multiculturalism. Says Gupta:
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. We are also much more multicultural. People don’t go to Church as often as before. Our understanding of religion is within multiculturalism, which is why some words such as “Pentecost” or “Whitsun” would have been in 20 years ago but not now.
Hmmm. I wonder, Ms. Gupta, if your little dictionary now has a pretty good run on words like Shiva, Krishna, Bhagavan, karma and the like. I wouldn’t doubt it, since if you look up “multiculturalism,” the definition is pretty much “putting immigrants’ cultures above our own.”
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