Quick Take: Dictionaries Are Weapons of Mass Destruction

Words are not little pebbles that you can pick and choose between to create strings of insults you can later use in Twitter, even if bloody Webster's says so

Lots of people love Webster’s dictionary and use it constantly. So let me begin by stating that it’s the worst dictionary ever created and one of the most pernicious sources of venom in Western discourse, as well as a hindrance to the study of history and should be destroyed.

There’s this saying, “look it up in Webster’s,” that gives this dictionary an authority that it should lack. Why? Because it was a doomed, wrong and misleading enterprise from the get-going, a dictionary that confuses rather than clarifies, and makes the English language a much poorer tool to think. Let’s have a look at the history of this awful thing.

Noah Webster devoted his long life (1758–1843) to reorganizing the way “English” people spoke and wrote in a country that had just severed its ties with England. He had been born a British subject, which he didn’t like at all, and grew up surrounded by like-minded people: upon independence proposals abounded to set a new national language for the new nation of America, distinct from English: for instance Hebrew, both to distance Yanks from Britain and to signal them as a chosen people; French and Greek were also considered.

Amid this debate, Noah Webster came up with the perfect idea: why don’t we simply teach all Americans to spell and speak alike, yet differently from the people of England? A couple of decades ago, the very British Times Literary Supplement had a wee bit of fun with the subject:

The result would be an “American language, to become over the years as different from the future language of England, as the modern Dutch, Danish and Swedish are from the German, or from one another”. But American regional pronunciations differed, hence Virginian contempt for the New Englanders who “talked funny”. That had to be rendered uniform. And pronunciation, Webster thought, tended to follow spelling. So the key to unifying America’s future would be a Spelling Book. Webster went to work on that¹.

The results were extraordinary, as Jess McHugh later noted in The Paris Review². In 1806, Webster published the first edition of his famous dictionary, writing in the preface that his intent was “to diffuse an uniformity and purity of language in America, to destroy the provincial prejudices that originate in the trifling differences of dialect.” Such, he added, “is the most ardent wish of the author.”

It was a new muscular, take-no-nonsense dictionary for a new muscular, take-no-nonsense nation that, in the span of a few years, blackmailed France out of Louisiana, snatched Florida from Spain and went to war against Britain in support of Emperor Napoleon, that famous freedom-loving democrat.

Above everything else, Webster longed to give the American public a language they could call their own: the spellings that Webster promoted have now become hallmarks of American English, including dropping the letter u in words like color, removing the k from mimic, and changing words like centre to center. There is not much sense to them, grammatically speaking: they are just Not British.

I love McHugh’s description of Webster, the man, for her easily-shocked audience. Americans may think Webster was a progressive, anti-snobbish force, but no! Read:

He was an eighteen-year-old Yale student when the Revolutionary War broke out. A passionate patriot, he enlisted during his summer vacation (though he accidentally arrived late to the Battle of Saratoga, missing the action). Webster’s contemporaries and his biographers have called him a zealot, and he even earned the nickname the Monarch for his attitude of superiority. “He was basically one of the most politically incorrect men alive,” Joshua Kendall, author of The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster’s Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture, told me on the phone. “Today Webster would be like a standard policy wonk on Sean Hannity, this right-wing, angry, white man.”

Webster hated the French with a passion and even started a daily newspaper in 1793 in part to combat French influence over the U.S. The American Minerva promoted a pro-Federalist and pro-American agenda while also documenting the atrocities carried out by the Jacobins.

His final dictionary, at last published in 1828, is a work of gargantuan proportion, containing some seventy thousand words, including nouns that did not exist in England, such as skunk and squash. Webster erased some of his more radical spellings, such as wimmen for women and tung for tongue, but the removal of u in words such as honor remained.

America’s most beloved politicians took notice of Webster’s efforts. On the eve of the Civil War, Jefferson Davis, future President of the Confederacy, declared how “Above all other people we are one: above all books which have united us in the bond of common language, I place the good old spelling-book of Noah Webster.” Can’t get a higher recommendation than that, from a man who knew so much about shared bondage.

Good old Noah died in 1843, but his legacy remains, in a shape that he might or might not be content with. The dictionary is not called Merriam-Webster for nothing: a firm called G &C Merriam Co., founded by the brothers George and Charles Merriam in 1831 in Springfield, Massachusetts, bought the rights to Webster’s magnus opus in 1841, when Webster himself was hardly in a position to object³.

Smart and enterprising as the Merriam brothers were, they secured the rights to create revised editions of the work. “Since that time, Merriam-Webster editors have carried forward Noah Webster’s work, creating some of the most widely used and respected dictionaries and reference books in the world,” as the firm puts it in the website.

This a website that millions of Google browsers look up every day, for clarity on the meaning of five-dollar words that journalists and politicians love to sprinkle upon their copy like magic dust. Instead, they find confusion and injury to their brains.

The bad influence of Merriam-Webster on the language is only too evident. In direct competition with more conservative British dictionaries, “Webster” has specialized on making incorrect meanings for misused words acceptable; in canonizing non-sensical, laughably wrong constructs like “irregardless”; in helping to standardize new meanings to support specific political views (see the added definition of “they” as non-binary singular); and in changing the meaning of well-known words, like “racism,” just to assuage specific pressure groups.

This sometimes happens on the basis of influential decisions such as the Associated Press’ 2020 move to declare that the word “mistress” (extremely useful and easily understood for all) is now “archaic” and “sexist” and should be replaced by the confusing “companion”…

…perhaps because everybody knew at the time that Kamala Harris, who started off her political career as the mistress of a much older Democratic Party politician, could end up in the presidential ticket as Joe Biden’s candidate for U.S. vice-president.

Sometimes, the change is made in real time, simply to smear a Republican politician or appointee (it’s always a Republican, people; must be the old Jefferson Davis connection). This was the case in mid-October 2020 when Judge Amy Coney Barrett used the expression “sexual preference” during her confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court. Webster’s had never considered the expression offensive until then, but that day Twitter filled up with Democratic activists accusing Coney Barret of Fascism, so Webster’s acted promptly. Very promptly, indeed.

From October 2020 exactly, the definition of “preference” reads: “offensive” when used in “sexual preference.”⁴ In July 2022, in the middle of strongly partisan US debates on transgender issues, the dictionary quickly added a politicized definition of female: “having a gender identity that is the opposite of male.”

More often, this kind of thing happens on the basis of wrong, sometimes deliberate and sometimes accidental, usage: since so many journalists and politicians often use such and such word ineptly, Merriam-Webster geniuses reason, that probably means they are right — and everyone else should do it too.

All that has a terrible effect on the English language, since the bad writers who popularize incorrect meanings often strip the specific meaning of one word to make it just a synonym for another word. The most blatant example is “bigotry” and its associated adjective “bigot.”

If you look up “bigot” in the Cambridge Dictionary or any other English-language dictionary from, say, before 2010, you can see its traditional meaning:

a person who has strong, unreasonable beliefs and who does not like other people who have different beliefs or a different way of life

That has been the meaning of “bigot” for centuries: the word was often applied to fundamentalists (often religious fundamentalists, but not always) who insisted that their way of looking at things was the only correct way: bores who would drum up their beliefs at every time, holier-than-thou extremists, IN DEFENSE OF WHICHEVER CAUSE.

Now, since about 2010, the word “bigot” is used by politicians and journalists as a string in a list of insults that all mean, in their uneducated minds, “racist”: xenophobe, narrow-minded, provincial, BIGOT…

This is 100% wrong. However, the Merriam-Webster online has quickly taken up the cause. This is how it defines “bigot” now:

A person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices

especially : one who regards or treats the members of a group (such as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance

You can see the trick here. It’s very obvious: it has come to pass that bigots (“person who has strong, unreasonable beliefs and who does not like other people who have different beliefs or a different way of life”: the kind of people who berate others on Twitter for their incorrect opinions or write Op-Eds for newspapers) now have changed the meaning of the word “bigot” itself, so it now describes people whom they don’t like.

This is not only a triumph of stupidity, ignorance and (yes!) bigotry. It’s a threat to civilization itself: thought is made impossible when the definition of words themselves is subjected to the changing mores of the ruling ideology. History is meaningless is the word “mistress” becomes an insult and “bigot” a loaded, alternative term for racist. Old books become impossible to decipher, old words become fodder for political activists to point that, actually you bigot, things always were the way they prefer them.

This is an old threat. The correct use of words was Confucius’ life-long obsession, as I discussed at length here:

Confucius is about to meet the ruler of the state of Wei, and his disciple Zilu asks the master what he will advise. Confucius says “fix the names.” When everyone around him looks puzzled, he explains:

“If the names aren’t correct, what you speak becomes nonsense. If you speak nonsense, you can’t get things done. If you don’t get things done, you can’t get the rituals to work. If the rituals don’t work, the law isn’t applied as it should. If the law isn’t applied as it should, the people can’t make a productive living. When a ruler names something, he must be able to make sense when talking about it. And when talking about it, he must be able to do what he means.”

Confucius understood that words are just names we put to things: names we put to things for a reason. That reason should be to make communication smoother, to make society work better. He then argued that, if people were to use them in ways which don’t make communication smoother, if they were used to lie and manipulate, then society malfunctions.

Confucius is, at the same time, advising rulers that society can go to hell through the purposefully wrong use of language, by calling a “ruler” a “pretender,” a “criminal” a “rebel,” a “charlatan” a “dissident”; and, also, that this is the bulk of the work done by most of the academic establishment, that is, Confucius' rivals in seeking favor with the rulers.

Along these lines, in “Through the looking-glass,” (1870) Lewis Carroll wonderfully describes the modus operandi of those who twist the meaning of words to serve their agendas:

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master—that’s all.’

“Bigot” is far, far, far from being the only example. And this not about Americans against British only. It goes much further than that. Take another popular word: “trope.”

This was almost unused even in educated writing before the last decade, until the New York Times decided to make it another of the five-dollar words that will sneak into its headlines to add gloss to commonplace conceptions. I found this graph in a blog piece that discusses how “trope” has suddently become a sort of synonym for “cliché” or “stereotype” for NYT writers who like to say the same thing over and over and not sound obnoxious.

This is Cambridge’s definition of “trope”:

specialized art, literature something such as an idea, phrase, or image that is often used in a particular artist’s work, in a particular type of art, etc.:

Example: Human-like robots are a classic trope of science fiction.

This is Webster’s bullshit-filled one:

Definition of trope

1a: a word or expression used in a figurative sense : FIGURE OF SPEECH

b: a common or overused theme or device : CLICHÉ the usual horror movie tropes

2: a phrase or verse added as an embellishment or interpolation to the sung parts of the Mass in the Middle Ages

Again, the same trick has been played: the traditional, specific, well-delineated, thought-provoking and thought-enhancing meaning is replaced by one simplified, simple-minded and wrong that turns the word into an unnecessary, false synonym for an already existing word.

Unconvinced? There are literally dozens of examples of five-dollar words that journalists and politicians misuse and debase, before Webster makes that violation of the language a rule:

-“Demur”

Cambridge’s:

to express disagreement or refuse to do something:

example: The lawyer requested a break in the court case, but the judge demurred.

Webster’s:

: hesitation (as in doing or accepting) usually based on doubt of the acceptability of something offered or proposed

(It was the Wall Street Journal’s style blog in 2015 — I used to work in the WSJ back then — that tipped me off on this one, as they wrote, apropos bad usage of the word in the WSJ itself: ‘Ah, demur. It is a word used (and abused) more in the media than real life. It means to “voice opposition” or object, not as we and others often use it, as a substitute for “avoided the issue.” New York Times editors have speculated that writers confuse it with the adjective demure and thus have fabricated a meaning of “politely avoided a response.” We should avoid that usage.’ Of course, Webster’s has embraced the confusion and made it its own.)

-“Disinterested”

Cambridge’s:

having no personal involvement or receiving no personal advantage, and therefore free to act fairly

Webster’s:

: not having the mind or feelings engaged (see ENGAGED sense 1) : not interested

-“Lion’s share”

Cambridge doesn’t have a definition, since it’s an expression. It always meant “all,” until writers unfamiliar with lions’ ethics decided that it meant “the largest portion”; so Webster’s informs us:

Definition of lion’s share

: the largest portion

For those interested in playing this kind of game by themselves, I recommend this comprehensive list of words and expressions that recently changed meaning, compiled by the writers of Slate. I’m pretty sure that you will always find Webster’s on the wrong side of lexicographic history. Every single time.

The word “dictator,” one of the most loaded and overused in modern political discourse, is not in Slate’s list. It makes sense, because there are few words that have been more misused, without actually having changed their meaning. “Dictatorship” was a Roman (in fact, Latin) political office: a temporary status given to a man to supersede all of the rest of powers in the Republic for an emergency period of, typically, six months.

That’s what dictatorship means. That and nothing else. Rome had plenty of dictators, and Julius Caesar was the last, murdered while in office. That explains why his adopted son, Augustus, didn’t add the position to his string of titles, and the office was phased out.

It’s only from the 20th century that the word “dictator” becomes commonly used in a derogatory sense, to refer to rulers perceived as DESPOTIC, not dictatorial, that is, working above the law with no limit to their DESPOTIC, not dictatorial (and thus temporary) powers.

By our time, dictatorship has become, in modern usage, an insult, describing that which is not democracy and also the opposite of democracy — thus, states as different as North Korea (hereditary Communist monarchy), Cuba (Communist oligarchy), Iran (Islamic Republic) and Russia (semi-authoritarian nationalist state) are all described as “Dictatorship.” Of course, Webster’s digs that:

1 : the office of dictator

2 : autocratic rule, control, or leadership

people suffering under his dictatorship

3 a: a form of government in which absolute power is concentrated in a dictator or a small clique

Communism and dictatorship

b : a government organization or group in which absolute power is so concentrated

rising up against a military dictatorship

c : a despotic state

establishing a dictatorship

That “dictator” is intended as insult and not description is evident in the fact that, curiously, the Ukraine (a state actually run by a dictator, a temporary wartime, emergency leader who has suspended elections) is never described as a dictatorship by either Western leaders, institutions or media.

The Cambridge dictionary is, as always, much more circumspect and precise:

[ C ] a country ruled by a dictator:

military dictatorship The country is being run by a repressive military dictatorship.

[ U ] the state of being, or being ruled by, a dictator:

dictatorship of The dictatorship of Franco lasted for nearly 40 years.

By the way, the example the Cambridge dictionary provides is perfect. Spain, under Francisco Franco, was indeed the last true modern dictatorship: a state run under emergency, temporary powers, that were not hereditary.

While Franco was “Generalísimo,” Spain was called “Kingdom of Spain” and yet it didn’t have a king, because Franco provided that one would only be crowned when he died. That is exactly what happened, and in 2025 we’ll have the 50th anniversary of that particularly transition of power.

Franco was not a despot (his power was not absolute and his to pass on to whoever), he was not a tyrant. He was a dictator.

Those words don’t mean the same, and they shouldn’t, because it makes no sense to have strings of word that mean the same, only so that people can use them as long-winded insults. We don’t need “bigot” to mean “racist,” because we already have a word for “racist.” We, in fact, need that “bigot” does NOT mean “racist.”

The whole point of words is to have separate meanings: otherwise we don’t need them. A mistress is not a prostitute and being disinterested is not the same as being uninterested. One would think that people who write dictionaries would understand this basic concept of language, but it appears that these morons (another word with a very precise meaning) don’t.

1. TLS, April 25, 2002.

2. March 30, 2018. Online.

3. Shame. He could have done something to simplify “Massachusetts” spelling into something more humane that still sounds exotic enough, like “Masachusets.”

4. Webster’s was the first dictionary where I noticed this pattern, but it’s not the only one. The popular “Urban Dictionary” displayed an entry for “Blue Anon,” referring to the idea that progressive activists were pushing far-out right-wing ideas to discredit conservatives. This entry was entirely deleted in March 2021.