Liminal Dictionary

From Ben Vershbow on the if:book blog: a dic­tio­nary in transition

James Gleick had a fas­ci­nat­ing piece in the Times Sunday mag­a­zine on how the Oxford English Dictionary is rein­vent­ing itself in the dig­i­tal age. The O.E.D. has always had to keep up with a rapidly evolv­ing English lan­guage. It took over 60 years, and two major sup­ple­ments, to arrive at a sec­ond edi­tion in 1989 — around the same time that Tim Berners-Lee and oth­ers at the CERN par­ti­cle physics lab in Switzerland were com­ing up with the idea for the world wide web. Ever since then, the O.E.D. been hard at work on a third edi­tion, but under rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent con­di­tions. Now, not just the lan­guage but the forms in which the lan­guage is trans­mit­ted are in an extreme state of flux:

In its early days, the O.E.D. found words almost exclu­sively in books; it was a record of the for­mal writ­ten lan­guage. No longer. The lan­guage upon which the lex­i­cog­ra­phers eaves­drop is larger, wilder and more amor­phous; it is a great, swirling, expand­ing cloud of mes­sag­ing and speech: news­pa­pers, mag­a­zines, pam­phlets; menus and busi­ness memos; Internet news groups and chat-room con­ver­sa­tions; and tele­vi­sion and radio broadcasts.

Crucial to this mas­sive lan­guage research pro­gram is a vast alpha­bet soup known as the Oxford English Corpus, a grow­ing data­base of more than a bil­lion words, culled mostly from the web, which O.E.D. lex­i­cog­ra­phers ana­lyze through var­i­ous pro­grams that com­pare and con­trast con­tem­po­rary word usages in con­texts rang­ing from nov­els and aca­d­e­mic papers to teen chat rooms and fan sites– “the fullest, most accu­rate pic­ture of the lan­guage today,” says the O.E.D (I’m curi­ous to know how broadly they sur­vey the world’s gen­eral adop­tion of English. I’m under the impres­sion that it’s still largely an Anglo-American affair).

Marshall McLuhan famously sum­ma­rized the shift from oral tra­di­tion to the writ­ten word as “an eye for an ear”: a gen­eral migra­tion of thought and expres­sion away from the folk­loric sound­scapes of tribal soci­ety toward encoun­ters by indi­vid­u­als with visual sym­bols on a page, a move­ment that cli­maxed in the age of print, and which McLuhan saw at last reversed in the global vil­lage of elec­tronic mass media. The curi­ous thing that McLuhan did not live long enough to wit­ness was the fusion of eye-ear cul­tures in the fast-moving tex­tual tra­di­tions of cell phones and the Internet. Written lan­guage has acquired an imme­di­acy and a mal­leabil­ity almost match­ing oral speech, and the effect is a dis­ori­ent­ing blur­ring of bound­aries where writ­ing is almost the same as speak­ing, read­ing more like overhearing.

So what is a dic­tio­nary to do? Or be? Such fun­da­men­tal change in the process of main­tain­ing “the defin­i­tive record of the English lan­guage” must have an effect on the prod­uct. Might the third “edi­tion” be its final never-ending one? Gleick again:

No one can say for sure whether O.E.D.3 will ever be pub­lished in paper and ink. By the point of deci­sion, not before 20 years or so, it will have dou­bled in size yet again. In the mean­time, it is mate­ri­al­iz­ing before the world’s eyes, bit by bit, online. It is a thor­ough­go­ing revi­sion of the entire text. Whereas the sec­ond edi­tion just added new words and new usages to the orig­i­nal entries, the cur­rent project is research­ing and revis­ing from scratch — pre­serv­ing the his­tory but aim­ing at a more coher­ent whole.

They’ve even exper­i­mented with bring­ing read­ers into the process, work­ing with the BBC ear­lier this year to solicit pub­lic aid in locat­ing first usages for a list of par­tic­u­larly hard-to-trace words. One won­ders how far they’d go in this direc­tion. It’s one thing to let peo­ple con­tribute at the edges — the 50 words in that list are all from the 20th cen­tury — but to open the full source code is quite another. It seems the dictionary’s chal­lenge is to remain a sturdy ark for the English lan­guage dur­ing this period of flood, and to pro­ceed under the assump­tion that we may have seen the last of the land.

——

It’s that last bit that really gets me going: the mis­sion for the OED to be “a sturdy ark for the English lan­guage dur­ing this period of flood, and to pro­ceed under the assump­tion that we may have have seen the last of the land.”

I have long felt that the myths which have formed around the Web bear a strik­ing sim­i­lar­ity to the myths of the American fron­tier, specif­i­cally the “anx­i­ety of belat­ed­ness,” the notion that the ide­al­ized, roman­ti­cized his­tory is always already gone. The Net began as an ide­al­ized realm for sci­en­tific dis­course, but before long it was cor­rupted by the com­mer­cial influ­ence. Merchants and ven­dors vul­gar­ized the Internet, and the tech­nolo­gies sur­round­ing the emer­gence of the World Wide Web made it too easy for com­mon­ers to get online. Suddenly every­one was surf­ing on the flood.

Language issues aside (and Vershbow is right, there is a flood of new lan­guage right now, one that isn’t likely to end until the “Revolution,” so to speak), the his­tory of the Web is remem­bered long­ingly. Purists wish that we could go back in time to the days before ban­ner ads and pop-ups, viruses and spy­ware. People who come to the Internet now do so through por­tals, like con­trolled access ramps to the “Information Superhighway” where the access is con­stantly fil­tered (AOL any­one?). The days of free, unfet­tered access are a thing of the past. The law­less free­dom of the good ol’ days has passed us by. In the idiom of Stephen King, “The world has moved on.”

The OED’s jour­ney on an eter­nal flood is another image of this lost fron­tier. Literally, the dic­tio­nary is adrift on the tech­no­log­i­cal ocean, its tra­di­tional meth­ods over­whelmed by the Flood, and like the bib­li­cal event, this flood could be con­sid­ered a puri­fy­ing rit­ual — one that removes the ves­tiges of the past, print tra­di­tion and takes us into a bold new world.

But I keep going back to the fron­tier myth. This vision for a brave new world is already old, because as soon as the fea­tures of that world come into focus, it will already be cor­rupted by some out­side influ­ence. It will already be com­mer­cial­ized, bought and sold. It will already be less than the ideal vision we have for it.

And to those who want to say that we can­not have an ideal vision of a truly hyper­tex­tual future, one in which lan­guage is con­stantly in flux, I say that we do any­way. The con­stant flux, the false belief in free­dom, is the ideal vision. And it is a false one. Call me an econ­o­mist or some other –ist, but I can­not see any human endeavor dis­con­nected from the basic supply/demand or resource/survival schemas. Even lan­guage falls vic­tim to these ways of thinking.

Of course there is one other pos­si­bil­ity: I am com­pletely wrong. The fron­tier myth does not apply to the Web because the Web is a par­a­digm shift, an anom­aly. The eco­nomic mod­els of resource/survival and supply/demand are flipped on their heads by a sys­tem that does not obey the tra­di­tional rules. The tragedy of the com­mons, but with an ever increas­ing resource base instead of a dimin­ish­ing one, right? (an idea from a book on the econ­omy of atten­tion, whose author I can’t remem­ber at the moment). The out­come of that scenario?

Singularity. A point past which pre­dic­tions are impossible.

I don’t buy that for a minute because at their heart, the Net, the OED, the lan­guages we use, they are are human sys­tems under human con­trol (for now). We can­not avoid human nature, and human nature is to sur­vive using resources. It is also human nature to look back on a world that was eas­ier and sim­pler, refus­ing to believe that world never existed at all.

More to come...

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