Offensive Words

Should a racist word be dropped from a Malay dictionary?

Malaysia's High Court has dismissed an appeal from an Indian Muslim association to have the derogatory term keling dropped from its pages. In The Star S.S. Yoga looks at the colourful history of racist slurs in Malaysia and around the world.

Writers Kee Thuan Chye, Dina Zaman and Amir Muhammad are asked for their opinions and agree that the word should not be omitted from the dictionary but should definitely be flagged as offensive.

I agree too. We may not love all the words that are in a dictionary but to pretend that they don't exist is in a sense dishonest. It is important though that dictionary users know whether such words are acceptable or not.

The example of the word nigger in English dictionaries is a good one. My Oxford Concise Dictionary (the one I keep on my desk) has a special usage note which tells me that the word has :

... strong offensive connotations and is today one of the most racially offensive words in the language ...

Wouldn't something like this work for the Kamus Dewan?

Varieties and Variations

The dictionary-loving part of me romped out this morning to do a presentation for Oxford University Press for the launch of the new Advanced Learner's Dictionary. Did my product endorsement bit up on stage, stressing all the unique selling points of the 7th edition.



I have no problem wearing the hat of dictionary advocacy - and the OALD is an excellent product, forced by an increasingly competitive market to continually reinvent and improve itself. (Bet you didn't know, incidentally, that all profits from the dictionary are ploughed into training scholarships for English language teachers.)

I learned when I was doing my agony-aunty-for-the-English-language bit for the Mind Our English page for The Star that most folks had problems with grammar points that could be both quickly and easily solved by reference to a good dictionary. The fact that they were willing to write e-mails to us and wait days if not weeks for a reply, frankly baffled me. "Buy a good learners' dictionary," I wrote at the end of almost every reply. Teach a man to fish ...

Am especially happy to see that so much vocabulary in the new OALD has been taken from other Englishes besides the big two ... and particularly that some Malaysianisms have made it into the dictionary. English is a world language and Malaysian English speakers own it as much as anyone. Malaysian English vocabulary differs somewhat from standard British English. Different is not wrong. And when such variations are acknowledged by the world's most scholarly publisher of dictionaries, it can only boost the confidence of local users. (I would actually like to see Oxford go even further and produce a fully localised English dictionary, but I guess the economics will always preclude that.)

When Chief Editor of the OALD, Sally Wehmeier, came to Malaysia last year she talked about how Oxford has lexicographers around the world working to chart developments in local varieties of English. I mentioned "handphone" to her as a local usage that should go into the dictionary because it is so widely used in Asia - and isn't it much nicer sounding than than "mobile" (beloved of Brits and antipodeans) and more descriptive than "cellphone" of American usage?

The word "bungalow" in British English means a single-storey house, but in this part of the world the word refers to "a large house, sometimes on more than one level", according to the dictionary. I'm really happy to see this. Shortly after I came to live here, I found myself expending vast quatities of red ink marking "double-storey bungalow" wrong wrong wrong in an end-of-year exam ... only to find that everyone in the English department sided with the kids and not with the supposed-expert Brit. My attempt to swim against the tide didn't last long. I'm quite proud of the fact now that I live in a double-storey bungalow house ... especially now that the word has Oxford's endorsement!

Johnson's Dictionary

Samuel Johnson's Dictionary was published 250 years ago this month. Beryl Bainbridge here describes how a failed teacher and celebrated 'hack' worked for nine years in a London garret to redefine the English language - and his reputation. His working methods for compiling the dictionary are described here in some detail. Just imagine what he could have done with a computer at his disposal!

I think dictionaries are sexy, and in a parallel universe I'm a lexicographer for sure - a job that combines a love of words with a love of research. (I seem fated to have a lot to do with dictionaries - writing reviews on them for The Star and promoting them for Oxford.) And I'm a great fan of Johnson's - if I had the chance to go back in history and have dinner with just one famous writer, it might well be him. I loved both Boswell's Life of and Beryl Bainbridge's novel about him: According to Queeney.

There's a lovely little cafe on Marylebone High Street in London called Patisserie Valerie where I love to hang out when I'm back home. Everywhere in London you get a buzz from stepping on history. But this place is special to me - quite apart from the fact the cakes are heavenly! The upstairs rooms used to accommodate a bookshop ... and it was here than Boswell met Johnson for the first time.