SNOWFLAKES IN AUTUMN!

by Brian Bamford

THE pears are ripe early this year and are already falling from the trees in the orchards and it's only just Harvest Festival, yet in the political world of the 'loco left' the snowflakes are already drifting all around us.  Someone called Ms. Maria Beatrice Giovanardi has launched a petition online calling on the publisher of the Oxford  University Press to delete words which she, and 30,000 others who have signed the petition, regard as offensive to women.

According to a Daily Star editorial yesterday:  'They want all the slang terms for women banned from the English dictionary,  This includes words such as "bird" and "biddy".'

Logically the Daily Star editor argues:
'Of course there will be those who find terms like these offensive.  But many others - both men and women - will not. 

'And the simple fact is these words are part of our everyday language. 

'You can't start axing them just because they give a select few the hump.' 

The Star editor has a point, because to start axing everyday words would impoverish  the English language.

A nephew of mine has sought to keep certain concepts and words away from his children by strictly censoring the our language and utterances when his kids are anywhere near within earshot. 

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein writes in Philosophical Investigations that the meaning of a word is its use in a language (Wittgenstein 1953, I, sec. 43):

'Words get their meaning by virtue of their relationships with other words and their use.'

Words are tools for expressing meaning in the everyday world.  Those with a schoolmaster mentality may not like that, and they may wish to control our use of language by some centralised diktat, but they will just have to lump it!

Yet the Snowflakes themselves are utterly naive if they think they can destroy disagreeable thoughts by expunging slang words they don't take a shine-to from the dictionaries; words are tools which we use to express our thoughts and meanings in the world.  Words exist independently of their dictionary definitions.  Indeed, Katherine Connor Martin from the Oxford University Press said in response to these detractors that a word 'will not be excluded from the dictionary solely on the grounds that it is offensive or derogatory', adding 'our dictionaries strive to reflect, rather than dictate language.'

Dictionaries in the natural course of things have to be constantly updated to keep up with changes in use of language.  In other words dictionaries follow the meanings and use in the real world, not the other way round.

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