The Lexicographer's Rules

My latest column in the Malaysia Star.

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Please don’t use a thesaurus. It does terrible things to your writing. Yes, that’s right. Do yourself a favour and forget about thesauruses. They’re harmful unless used correctly.

Usually, thesaurus-users are looking for a different word for an idea they have in mind. The word they already know for that idea seems tired or worn out. They want a fresh word.

Or they feel that the words they’re using don’t have gravity (that is, they don’t seem important or weighty). They want their writing to sound more sophisticated or more educated.

Or they just like using a lot of different words. New words are fun.

So they go to the thesaurus, look up the word they do know, and get an exciting array of other choices that, supposedly, mean the same thing.

Problem is, no thesaurus that I know—I own more than a dozen—has definitions in the thesaurus entries. Unless you already know all the words in question, there’s no way at all to determine which word is the right word.

And believe me, most of the synonyms given in a thesaurus are not the right words.

For example, if you look up frank, meaning “honest, direct (when speaking or writing), or straightforward”, you might find candid, open, free, round, blunt, naive, and guileless. (These come from three thesauruses.)

I’ll admit that a thesaurus can be useful if there’s a word on the tip of your tongue (meaning, you can’t quite remember it). A thesaurus is good at reminding you of words that you already know. If blunt was the word you were forgetting, then now you are reminded of it.

Really, though, if you can’t think of the word, then it probably isn’t the right word in the first place.

If you don’t know the synonyms that are suggested—or better, if you don’t know all the uses of a synonym—then there’s no guidance at all as to which one to choose. So people tend to choose a word willy-nilly (without care or scruple) as if they all serve the same purpose.

This is also true of people who use bilingual dictionaries, which also tend to be rather sparse in offering good contextual information on how best to use a word.

Let’s look at the synonyms for frank. For one thing, they cannot all be simply slotted into the same hole in the same sentence. Try it:

Let me be frank with you. The original sentence. It means, “Let me tell you the truth without hiding what I’m thinking.”

Let me be honest with you. This is almost synonymous with the sentence above, although many people would tell you that if someone says “let me be honest”, then they’re probably about to tell you a lie and if they say “let me be frank”, they’re probably about to say something hurtful.

Let me be free with you. This doesn’t work at all. The only way “free” really works as a synonym of “frank” is in a sentence like “He was free with his opinions,” meaning “He gave his opinions frankly.”

Let me be blunt with you. This kind of works, but it’s better just as “Let me be blunt.”

Let me be naive with you. This doesn’t work at all. Naive is only vaguely related to uses of frank when it is used to describe someone as having a “frank visage” or “frank face”, meaning that all of their emotions and thoughts seem to be evident in their facial expressions.

Let me be guileless with you. This has the same problem as naive. Being frank is a wilful act. You do it on purpose. Being guileless is something that you are without trying and probably without realizing.

Let me be round with you. This doesn’t work, either. What, pray tell, is round doing in there? Well, it belongs to an old-fashioned meaning that is pretty close to the meaning of frank, but, unlike frank, you’d never use it to describe a person but only to describe the type of language they were using. You most often find it today in the adverb form, as in, “She cursed him roundly.” It’s also related to to round on somebody, which means to suddenly attack someone, usually with harsh, angry language.

As you can see, each of these supposed synonyms for frank comes with its own connotations. Connotations are like little flags of useful information that tell you under what circumstances a word should be used.

You can only learn the connotations if you read or talk a lot in the language in question, or if you have high-quality reference works that provide them.

So if you insist on using a thesaurus, your best bet is to make sure that you look up the synonyms you find there in a dictionary.

I should also add that if you find yourself going to the thesaurus in order to make your writing seem better than it is, then you have a larger problem than deciding which word to use.

Maybe what you’re writing about is what is really in need of changing. Maybe your topic is stale, your subject matter weak, or your inspiration lacking. Finding a different word isn’t going to fix that.

If you’re looking for a new word to represent an old idea because you’ve already used the original word too many times, then maybe you’re putting lipstick on a pig. Maybe it’s time to start over.

License revoked: Can bad language punditry be stopped?. Jan Freeman writes in the Boston Globe about her ideal world, in which journalists, commentators, and other public figures would double-check their facts before they go spreading misinformation about language, especially about word origins.

Jan’s perspective is spot-on. There’s a laxness—an insufficient intellectual rigor—where it comes to language commentary, even by some of our media colleagues who should know better. Of course, everyone makes mistakes, but if you haven’t even checked the most basic resources and reference works before repeating some false etymology, that’s just laziness.

From where I sit, most of this laziness comes from people who learned a few things early in their careers and then haven’t bothered to keep up with the state of the art. In word origins in particular, my colleagues are debunking old stories by the page-fulls, so you can’t just keep quoting the same few books. You’ve got to participate in the community: read the language blogs, join the email lists, participate in the discussion forums, and, even listen to radio shows. When we do word origins, Martha and I often share first-hand primary research that we have done ourselves, stuff that cannot be found in any book. We don’t lord it around and shout “exclusive!” but it’s satisfying to know that hundreds of thousands of listeners are getting the straight dope as far as it can be known.

Directly on this subject is the column by Fred Shapiro in the New York Times Sunday Magazine today, in which, as he fills in for William Safire, he demonstrates how many of the people we believe said certain famous quotes did not, in fact, say them. It’s not just a few. There are *thousands* of them that even the most revered collections of quotations get wrong: they get the name wrong, the data wrong, and, sometimes, they even get the original quote wrong.

Here’s my latest column from the Malaysia Star.

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One of the things we know to be true about all languages is that they all have words for certain concepts and things, like mother, water and moon. The things everyone has, needs, or sees.

There are also words for concepts and things that are less universal, but still widespread.

For example, in New York City there is something called a dollar van, which I’ve mentioned here before. Dollar vans are privately-owned passenger vans that operate along loose regular routes, just like city-run buses. They used to cost only a dollar, thus the name.

However, the same basic idea—a privately owned van or truck serving as public transportation—goes by different names in other countries.

In Haiti, they’re called tap-taps. There, they are often colourfully painted with extravagant scenes, sometimes memorialising a loved one who has died.

In Mozambique, they’re called chapas.

In Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, they’re called matatus.

Another thing that seems to appear in culture after culture (and language after language) is a pride in being slow or late. There are many places in the world where precise times are just guidelines, not absolutes.

It’s a way of saying, “We’re slow and proud of it”, and to make a little bit of fun of one’s community. Admittedly, sometimes these terms are used by unkind outsiders who aren’t accustomed to a carefree attitude towards schedules and deadlines.

In Hispanic cultures, it’s called mañana time. Mañana means tomorrow in Spanish.

In the English-speaking parts of the Caribbean, it’s called island time.

I remember this term well from when I lived on the island of St Croix. “What time is the boat coming?” someone would ask. “Island time,” someone else would answer.

In Rarotonga, a part of the Cook Islands in the Pacific, they call it Raro time.

In Bamfield, British Columbia, they call it Bamfield time.

Throughout Africa, it’s called African time, especially by non-Africans who don’t always mean it in a friendly or understanding way.

In Malaysia, it’s of course called Malaysian time.

I’ve even seen it called doper time, referring to the casual and informal way in which drug dealers and drug users treat the hours of the day. If you’re already breaking the law, breaking the clock is much easier.

Living on mañana time or island time means a store might open or close late. A boat or train is bound to be late. A party might not have any guests until hours after it was supposed to start. Some guests might not show up at all, with no explanation.

One of my favourite word lists that I keep is the name of all the kinds of food that are basically a fried pastry with a vegetable, fruit or meat filling.

In the United States, we have turnovers. Most people know them as being stuffed with fruit (the McDonald’s restaurant chain has particularly sweet ones: good to taste but bad for your waist), although you can also have vegetable turnovers.

The Chinese have what we call pot stickers in English, crescent-shaped little dough-wrapped morsels that can have any sort of vegetable or meat filling, though not fruit.

The British, of course, are known for their pasties. There are also empanadas from Latin America and the related empadas and empadinhas from Portugal and Brazil.

There are samosas from India and patties from the Caribbean. There are also Iranian samboosas and you might even throw in East European pierogies.

In Malaysia, there’s of course, the curry puff.

Not all exactly alike, but, you know, all are filled, fried dough.

My all-time favourite idea for which a lot of languages have a different expression is the term for sunshower, that is, when it is raining and the sun is shining at the same time.

About 10 years ago, Bert Vaux compiled a list of these for the Linguist List and the topic has come up a couple of times on our radio show. I’m always seeing new ones, too.

Lots of cultures think sunshowers have to do with someone, or some animal, having a wedding: devils, hyenas, rats, birds, bears, tigers, foxes, donkeys, jackals, an old woman, a widow.

Some cultures think of it as someone or something giving birth: a deer, a rabbit, a hyena, a fox, a leopard, a wolf. In Armenian, it’s specifically a wolf giving birth on a mountain.

The devil features large in many of these expressions. In the American South, when there’s a sunshower, they might say the devil is beating his wife. They say this, too, in Hungarian. In Dutch, he might also beat his mother. In Jamaica, they say the devil and his wife are fighting over a chicken bone.

In Korea, they might call it a fox rain or a tiger rain.

In Dutch, they say there’s a fair in hell.

In a bunch of places, it’s also called a monkey’s birthday.

Of course, to some people it’s simply hujan panas.

The Scottish Language Dictionaries program has had its funding withdrawn by the Scottish Arts Council.

SLD, a charity, is responsible for the Dictionary of the Scots Language online (which offers at no charge the 22 volumes of the Scottish National Dictionary and the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, and other works), the Concise Scots Dictionary, the Essential Scots Dictionary, and other reference works.

As a regular user of DSL, I write this email in order to encourage my colleagues to support SLD in any way they can.

To ensure that they stay in operation, SLD is holding a fundraiser by auctioning celebrity-related items on eBay, including stuff from actor Alan Cumming, radio presenter Andrew Marr (whose “Start the Week” podcast is one of my must-listens), the shooting script for the movie Sweet Sixteen, dinner with Hardeep Singh Kohli--he’ll cook, a signed photo of actor Robbie Coltrane, and other items.

The auction.

The main site.

A story in the Scotsman about the funding and fundraiser.

Thanks.

A hat-tip to the SouthWest Writers’ group, which mentioned Double-Tongued Dictionary in its July-August newsletter. Thanks!