Having breakfast with my aunt, uncle, and cousins several months ago (it took me a long time to post this one), I learned something terrible. My family informed me, and the dictionary app on my phone confirmed, that the wordirregardless is in the dictionary.
“Irregardless?” I asked. “As in ‘without without regard’?” I looked at the app again, just to be sure I’d read it correctly. Indeed I had—and my heart broke a little.
Though I’d argue that some words shouldn’t be included in any dictionary ever, this got me thinking back to a lesson from my college days about dictionaries and the difference slants they take in choosing words to include. Every dictionary falls into one of two very different categories.
Descriptive Diction
I don’t have too many apps on my iPhone, but one I couldn’t do without is Slango, the Urban Dictionary app. It helps me define important terms like bromance and babymama: words that specific demographics of people use in everyday speech but will most likely never appear on a middle-school vocabulary test. I have this application—and use it now and again—because I want to understand what people around me are saying.
This is the purpose of a descriptive dictionary: to describe and define words real people are using.
Prescriptive Diction
People often pin English majors as grammar Nazis. Some are, but not all. It really doesn’t matter if you answer the question, “How are you doing?” with “Good,” because you’re just talking, not writing a thesis.
However, when you are writing a thesis, the rules are important, and a prescriptive dictionary is one tool that can help.
When I look to the professionals behind the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, I can trust them to teach me the right way use my language. I won’t find a series of all the half-cocked things that have come out of people’s mouths—including mine—and accidentally include that in a cover letter, but rather learn the most accepted and universally clear words I can.
At the heart of a prescriptive dictionary is the desire to teach people how to use our language properly, conveying our thoughts in terms that are standardized, so that everyone understands what’s being said.
Maintaining the Tension
So which is it? Should a dictionary reflect common diction or shape it?
It’s easy to live in one of these extremes, accepting one as right and the other as wrong. People have fallen on either side of the debate for centuries, but I don’t think it’s that simple—and frankly neither to many modern dictionaries. We often gain the most when we take both ends and, like a pair of complementing tools, apply them at the right times.
Though we often oppose them, rules are actually good for us. They make sure we’re all on the same page, playing the same game. Without rules in the arena of language, writing and communicating would be very difficult over long distances. Local communities inevitably develop local standards of communication, but without a set and circulated list of “proper” usage rules uniting those communities, the different local patterns invariably move further and further apart, making clear cross-community communication increasingly unlikely, until one day, you actually have different languages. It may sound a bit ridiculous, but prescriptive dictionaries actually help keep a language together.
However, the world will not always abide by an academically approved set of language guidelines, and that’s a good thing too. Though the academics have a huge hand to play in describing and defining the ins and outs of our language, they need the creative types too.
As local usage patterns change the way the language behaves on a small level, we wind up finding new and intriguing ways to say the same old things more vibrantly. Art requires innovation, and language is definitely an art. It’s in the freedom to explore and experiment with the meaning and usage of terms that we find our language becoming ever more alive, agile, and beautiful. If those expansions to the language aren’t documented so that people can understand them, though, we’re left with a lot of people frustratedly scratching their heads to figure out what they’re reading. This is the value of the descriptive dictionary.
When used in conjunction, the two types of dictionaries really reflect the juxtaposed but complementary nature of language as a whole. The strict and stalwart rules of proper usage are like a flagpole, creating a sturdy framework of fundamentals that isn’t susceptible to the short memory and flighty whims of the human mind and tongue. This gives anchorage to the more fluid, colorful side of language, allowing it the freedom to catch the wind and fly, unfurling all its beauty without blowing away into incoherent mess.
Today, many dictionaries try to do both, giving an inclusive look at commonly used terms while making note as to which ones aren’t suitable for certain settings, which is a pretty fair middle ground that I can appreciate—though I still think irregardless is a dumb word.
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