Abstract
THE EXPRESSION OF CHANGING SOCIAL VALUES IN DICTIONARIES Sidney I. Landau The manner in which dictionaries reflect shifts in prevailing social sentiment can tell us a great deal about how far and fast attitudes, and possibly behavior as well, have changed over time. The social values embedded in dictionaries are perhaps most accessible in children's dictionaries, where the abundance of invented illustrative sentences in support of definition betrays as few other contemporary sources can the prevailing attitudes toward and about boys and girls and their parents. This study was suggested by "An Evaluation of the 1952 and 1962 Editions of the Thorndike-Barnhart Beginning Dictionary," by Ann Ediger Baehr. By compiling a list of the illustrative sentences in the 1952 edition, Baehr convincingly demonstrated, among other things, that boys were presented routinely as mischievous or wicked and girls as tender and dutiful. This paper is an elaboration of her method and represents an attempt to analyze in a systematic way the corresponding illustrative sentences of two different editions of the same work. Let us make our assumptions clear at the outset. Commercial lexicographers, like other people engaged in business, are mindful of their market. The values their products express must be designed, whether consciously or not, to appeal to those who are likely to buy dictionaries. (In this they are no different from textbook publishers, producers of movies, or manufacturers of swimsuits.) Their customers may not actually observe the values expressed any more than they really look the way they think they do in the swimsuits they buy, but the question here is one of self-image, not behavior. Or rather, of buying behavior, not the coincidence or lack of it between ethical standard and moral behavior. The Thorndike-Barnhart dictionaries, published for the school market by Scott, Foresman, are the most successful school dictionaries ever published. There can be no question of their appeal to large numbers of educators and teachers over many years. One can assume, therefore, that the social values 261 262 The Expression of Changing Social Values expressed in the Thorndike-Barnhart dictionaries succeed in reflecting the prevailing social values of their market. This study compares two editions of the Thorndike Barnhart Beginning Dictionary published fifteen years apart, those of 1968 and 1983. The 1983 edition, called the Scott, Foresman Beginning Dictionary, contains about 25,000 entries and, like the earlier edition, is designed for children in grades 3-5, that is, for children of ages 8 to 10 or 11 years. The focus of my attention is references in illustrative sentences in four areas: child-adult relationships, family members, gender, and malefemale relationships. A child-adult reference includes mention of a child and adult and states or implies a relationship between them. For example, "The teacher chastened the bad-tempered boy" (1968) indicates a child-adult relationship. Any reference to a family member, whether in the context of a child-adult relationship or not, is coded for family. For example, "Mother clipped the recipe and pasted it in her cookbook" (1968) is a family reference only, whereas "He clings to the belief of his father" (1968) is both. Specific references to mothers and fathers are tabulated separately in addition to being family references. Any explicit gender reference, whether by a personal name or personal pronoun, is tabulated, not as male or female but simply as gender or nongender. For example, the illustration for cherish (1968), "A mother cherishes her baby," was changed in 1983 to "Parents cherish their children." Thus the gender reference as well as the reference to mother was deleted. Finally, the smallest category but in some ways the most interesting is that of male-female relationships, often in a sentence implying rather than stating a relationship, as, for example, in this illustration for idle (1968): "It is idle for a girl to wish to be a boy." Sidney I. Landau 263 The study was based on three samples of twenty-three pages each from widely separated sections of the alphabet— ceaseless-compartment, hideous-infuse, and run-settle —representing more than ten percent of the entire 650-page A-Z section of the 1968 edition. Within these three sections, every illustrative sentence...
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More From: Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America
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