Dictionaries change their meaning

Sooner or later discussions about linguistics usually lead to the words descriptive and prescriptive. A descriptive approach describes the way a language is used. A prescriptive approach declares how it should be used.

Your elementary and high school teachers probably followed the prescriptive model. They taught proper grammar, proper spelling, proper pronunciation, etc. Propriety was the true objective. Today the enforcers of politically correct speech take a similarly prescriptive approach, even if it sometimes differs from that of our English teachers. For example, you must never use the pronoun he when referring to a person whose gender is not specified, although for some reason the pronoun she is perfectly acceptable.

Dictionaries, however, have traditionally been descriptive. Scrabble players may view them as prescriptive, since a word not found in the dictionary is not allowed in the game, but dictionaries usually considered themselves descriptive. They listed the words people actually used, the spellings actually used, the definitions actually used and the pronunciations actually used. That's why you can find ain't in a good dictionary — because real people use the word, whether their English teachers would have approved or not.

It helped that dictionaries were printed on paper and it took a number of years for a new edition to be prepared. Thus lexicographers had sufficient time to determine whether new words and new usages had become accepted into the language enough to become worthy of inclusion. Some slang expressions, for example, turn out to be fleeting, falling out of the language as quickly as they enter it.

Today, however, dictionaries are online, meaning that changes can be made quickly and constantly. One unintended consequence of this is that dictionaries have, like so much else in our society, fallen victim to social and political pressures, making them less descriptive and more prescriptive.

Two instances of this have come to light in recent months, both involving the Merriam-Webster dictionary. During the Senate confirmation hearings for Amy Comey Barrett's nomination to the Supreme Court of the United States, Barrett used the phrase "sexual preference" in the way it has been used for a number of years, including undoubtedly by most members of that Senate committee. One senator immediately objected, stating that the term was offensive to LGBTQ activists. Within hours the dictionary added an entry stating that the term sexual preference was considered offensive.

Then the dictionary changed its definition of racism after a recent Drake University graduate complained that the given definition did not take into account the presumed systemic nature of racism.

In earlier times, the dictionary would have, by necessity, taken time to consider whether a significant number of English speakers actually understood sexual preference and racism in these ways, and only then making descriptive changes. Instead the dictionary now prescribes usages it considers proper, just like our English teachers used to do.