Apathy Sketchpad

One of my columns last year was on the subject of the evoloution of languages, and clearly I was in favour of it. However, I feel this point now needs clarifying: I’m all in favour of the evoloution of languages, as long as it’s done right. This means that new words people use a lot are assimilated into the language, and words nobody has used in a hundred years are dropped. One would expect the dictionaries to be updated in the same manner, but unfortunately dictionaries are compiled by lexicographers, and in twenty years I have not met a lexicographer. From this, I conclude that lexicographers are small, cat-like creatures which inhabit ventilation systems and spare rooms, with no contact with the human race, and therefore compile dictionaries based on which new words they think they would say. This would explain why, although I have heard no more people say “I did a delia,” “This recipe is a real delia,” or “It’s weblish for ‘be right back’,” than I have met lexicographers, all of those words appear in recent dictionaries.

So, the question raised here is: If lexicographers have no idea which words people use, what exactly are they for? And the answer, I think, is to dilute the amount of Richard Whitely in Countdown, and the dictionaries exist purely to fund and justify this, in much the same way that while the average man on the street thinks universities exist to append abbreviations to my name, they in fact exist to invent things big companies can’t be bothered inventing themselves.

And then there’s the small matter of William Shakespeare. He is generally agreed to be the greatest playwright ever to live, by everyone except students forced to trawl his plays looking for tiny connections that aren’t there to write about in an essay which is clearly going to be more boring than all but the actual play. He is also said to have one of the largest vocabularies in history, but let me let you in on a little secret here: This is because he made up more words than anyone else in history. Now, call me pedantic if you want, but to me a truly great exponent of the English language might at least have had the decency to use it correctly. It would be nice, perhaps, to watch a play being performed and understand the words the actors are saying. And he wrote some very contrived sounding lines in a desperate bid to stick rigidly to iambic pentameter, hence the phrase “how how how how chopped logic, what is this?” appears in millions of books worldwide. To my knowledge, there is no grammatically correct construction which uses the same word four times in a row, but then, grammar was never Shakespeare’s strongest card, either.