By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer
Oxford University Press has decided to delete words such as sin, devil, altar and bishop from the new Oxford Junior Dictionary and replace them with more contemporary words such as celebrity, MP3 player and tolerant.
Vineeta Gupta, who is in charge of children’s dictionaries at Oxford University Press, described the reason behind the changes in the new Junior Dictionary to the Daily Telegraph.
“When you look back at older versions of dictionaries, there were lots of examples of flowers for instance,” Ms Gupta said. “That was because many children lived in semi-rural environments and saw the seasons. Nowadays, the environment has changed. We are also much more multicultural. People don’t go to church as often as before.”
She added: “Our understanding of religion is within multiculturalism, which is why some words such as ‘Pentecost’ or ‘Whitsun’ would have been in 20 years ago but not now.”
Not everyone agrees. British academics and teachers say the changes to the 10,000 word Junior Dictionary could mean that children lose touch with Britain’s heritage.
“We have a certain Christian narrative which has given meaning to us over the last 2,000 years. To say it is all relative and replaceable is questionable,” said Professor Alan Smithers, the director of the centre for education and employment at Buckingham University.
“The word selections are a very interesting reflection of the way childhood is going, moving away from our spiritual background and the natural world and towards the world that information technology creates for us.”
One worried mother, Lisa Saunders, said she has seen a vast number of important Christian words removed from the dictionary, mostly since 2003.
“The Christian faith still has a strong following,” she said. “To eradicate so many words associated with Christianity will have a big effect on the numerous primary schools who use it.”
Ms. Saunders first realised words were being removed when she was helping her son with his homework and discovered that “moss” and “fern”, which were in editions up until 2003, were no longer listed.
“I decide to take a closer look and compare the new version to the other editions,” said the mother of four from Co Down, Northern Ireland. “I was completely horrified by the vast number of words which have been removed.”
Deleted Christian words include abbey, aisle, altar, bishop, chapel, christen, disciple, minister, monastery, monk, nun, nunnery, parish, pew, psalm, pulpit, saint, sin, devil, vicar.
Words pertaining to the monarchy have also been deleted, such as coronation, duchess, duke, emperor, empire, monarch.
In their place, new words were added such as blog, broadband, MP3 player, voicemail, attachment, database, export, chatroom, bullet point, cut and paste, analogue.
The publisher selects words for its Junior Edition with the aid of the Children’s Corpus, a list of about 50 million words made up of general language words from children’s books and terms related to the school curriculum. Lexicographers consider word frequency when making additions and deletions.
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