As many others have said, Hayakawa's principles relate directly to everyday life. Today, I was helping my family clean out my great-grandparents house that is going to be sold. While I was going through a massive pile of books, an old dictionary caught my eye. I wasn't able to find a publishing date in it, so I looked it up on the internet and found out that it was published in 1945. The complete title is The Winston Dictionary: Primary Edition, With Every Word Defined So That Its Use and Meaning Can Be Easily Understood.
When I first saw the dictionary, I immediately thought of how words change over time, and how much different this dictionary must be from the ones we use today. Probably the most obvious word popped into my head: "computer". I looked this up in the dictionary and found that it wasn't there, although "computation" and "compute" were. On the same page, I saw another word: "comptograph- a kind of adding machine which prints the sum arrived at". I looked this word up in my modern dictionary, and found that it also was not included.
I then looked again at the title of the book, and began thinking about what dictionaries really do. According to The Winston Dictionary, they define a word "so that its use and meaning can be easily understood." I dealt with this topic a bit in my scrapbook. Hayakawa states that "We learn the meanings of practically all our words (which are, it will be remembered, merely complicated noises), not from dictionaries, not from definitions, but from hearing these noises as they accompany actual situations in life and learning to associate certain noises with certain situations.” Although dictionaries may strive to make their words "easily understood", a formal definition can only aid in the process of understanding a word. We must experience the word in life to really understand what it means.
The Winston Dictionary also had a section called "The Development of English". I read the first couple paragraphs of this, and I found quote that was almost exactly like Hayakawa's ideas: "The English language is a 'going concern'. Its business is expanding and there is continual need for new words the meet the demands made upon it. In these times of intense living and rapid progress we are daily finding new things, thinking new things, for which we need new words. Anything that affeects a great many people or receives extensive consideration adds its quota of words to vocabulary." It goes on to give examples of things important to the 1945 time period that added words to the English language: the automobile, the motion picture, World War II, the airplane, and radio transmissions.
-Audrey Kindsfather
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"comptograph- a kind of adding machine which prints the sum arrived at"
ReplyDeleteThat's really interesting that the dictionary opted to use informal grammar (ending in a preposition) in order to make its definitions seem "easily understood." The editors of the dictionary covered up the fact that definitions cannot force people to understand the meaning of the word by avoiding formal grammar. That makes sense since they're editors of dictionaries and they need to do their jobs as best they can, even if what they're trying to accomplish is impossible. Dictionaries can't give context except for the ones that offer pictures, which is a good way of providing extensional meaning.
-- tori lee
I remember being back in first grade when everyone is learning to read and we all still had pretty small vocabularies. The teacher taught us a lesson on how to use context clues to discover the meaning of words. Even she understood the limits of dictionaries and attempted to teach us how to get around those limits.
ReplyDelete~Becca LaRosa