Number 37
Often people use the word "gentleman" in reference to a man they don't like or approve of, in a laudable attempt to be civil: "That gentleman said, etc." That's sort of like a policeman referring to a criminal as "the individual" in order not to say "that scumbag" or someone saying "that lady" who means something worse than "woman". It's good to be polite, and it's OK to be sarcastic, but "gentleman" and "lady" lose meaning when they mean simply male human and female human.
Of course, in the United States we don't have the precise class assignment attached to the words as England has or had, where "person" might refer to someone who was not a gentleman or lady. I once had a professor of German, from the old country (some old country, anyway), who asked us to define "gentleman". Since no one else volunteered, I said, "A gentleman is someone who is always kind to others?" (Note the question mark.) "No!" he cried. "That has nothing to do with it! A gentleman is always clean and neat, even if his clothes are old." So we were talking about two different things. But the words do still denote something more than a gender assignment ~ a person of some refinement or education or good manners, worthy of respect.
When feminists began to insist on the use of "woman" to refer to females of legal age, the word sounded a bit harsh, even lewd. Why was that? We were used to hearing and saying "lady" for any woman who wasn't a "girl". "Woman" sounded so earthy. "And God Created Woman" meant Brigette Bardot and "old woman" sounded like an insult. Eventually I got used to being a "woman" because being a "lady" was too much to live up to at every moment, and I didn't like what it usually implied and required. As for "girl", I didn't want people to think I was trying to remain a "girl" after I grew up and had children.
But we don't want to lose gentlemen and ladies. I want to be able to use those words to mean people who rise above the common run of behavior. They cannot, logically, apply to every person. Perhaps people who use these words indiscriminately wish to say something about their own standard of behavior ~ "I treat everyone the same, regardless, no matter what airholes they really are. I am a gentleman [or lady]."
The August 18 issue of The Weekly Standard carries an article called "Don't Look It Up! ~ The Decline of the Dictionary" by Robert Hartwell Fiske, in which he reviews the Eleventh Edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, which has added around ten thousand words, but omitted many to make room for new ones of dubious value. What words did they omit, Fiske asks, to make room for "McJob" and "funplex"? We know that most slang is ephemeral; there's no way to know which slang words will stay. It's not a bad idea to catch them on the fly, as a record of American English in the year 2003 (or probably 2002).
More worrying is the inclusion of words with incorrect definitions, the rationale being that lots of people use the words incorrectly (e.g. "disinterested" to mean "uninterested" (see PO 20). "Enormity" is defined to mean "enormousness" (see PO 36). In cases like these, adding a word or definition really means losing a word.
I don't think it's necessarily wrong to include slang, idioms, or "substandard" English in a dictionary. For instance, "ain't" doesn't confuse anyone, it has a venerable history, and really should be given legitimacy. It's simply a contraction of "am not" and there is no other one; we need it. But just because lots of people make the same mistakes, over and over, more than ever because of poorly educated journalists who give credibility to error, I have to agree with Fiske that the lexicographers may have outlived their usefulness, and maybe he's right that money is a motive ~ you have to buy the latest edition of their dictionary to keep up with newly acceptable barbarisms.
There's long been an argument about prescriptive versus descriptive dictionaries. Should lexicographers presume to make rules, or should they merely describe what people actually say in an "evolving" language? Without rules or agreed-upon usage, we would soon be unable to understand each other; or if not that, at least we would lose the ability to express ourselves with precision. On the other hand, we don't want English to become a dead language, like Latin, frozen in time.
I think the thing to do is to keep arguing about it.
Time has a new book out called The War in Iraq: The Illustrated History. It's not too soon to publish books on the war in Iraq, but it's too soon to call such a book a "history", and definitely too soon to call it "the" history.
I'm teaching again, but not in the kind of classroom I fled in May. I'm teaching English as a foreign language to a young Japanese woman. I feel justified, sanctified, and redeemed. Watch this space for language notes and questions arising from these lessons.
Copyright Rhonda Keith 2003. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but it is permissible to forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.
Parvum Opus is a publication of KeithOps / Opus Publishing Services. Feel free to comment in the Guestbook, linked below the back issue links.
Feel free to e-mail me with comments or queries. If you don’t want to receive Parvum Opus, please reply with “unsubscribe,” “quit,” “enough,” or something like that in the subject line, and I’ll take you off the mailing list.
Return to KeithOps.