A lexicographical moment (in Spanish class)

I felt a little like Hermione Granger today, but I'm sorry. Linguistics really gets me going in that eyes shiny, face-lighting-up kind of way. It happened during my first Spanish class here in Austin, at a branch of the local community college. I was there with my principal and a colleague; we'd registered together because so many of our students and their parents are native Spanish speakers. Plus, Texas is one of the most unabashedly bilingual places I've ever experienced, up to and including Southern California, which, frankly, doesn't hold a candle to the Lone Star State's surprisingly non-strident approach to dual language issues. In public education and everywhere else. More on that another time.

My Hermione moment came during a mini-lecture on Spanish dictionaries. The professor mentioned, in passing, the Real Academia Espanola, the official body based in Madrid that guides and administers the Spanish language. Many languages, especially in Europe, have a similar group of intellectuals and linguists whose job it is to guard and protect a language against all invaders. The French academy, for example, is notorious for throwing a fit at the mere mention of borrowed words like "le weekend" or "le laptop." My fellow Spanish students figured that English has the same set up, so one of them asked about it.

"Oh no," the teacher said. "English doesn't have an academy."

"So, we just go to the dictionary to find out what words to use?" said the student. Cause, certainly, there had to be a central authority somewhere. Right?

And this is where my hand shot up and started waving in the air. My principal looked at me funny. My colleague muttered "teacher's pet" under her breath. But I couldn't help it. My heart started beating faster; my cheeks flushed with excitement. I had to share with my classmates one of the coolest things about the English language.

Because, in English, we don't go to the dictionary to find out what words to use and how. The dictionary comes to us. Yes, us. All of us speakers of English from the northern tip of Alaska to the heart of London, from the streets of New Delhi to the malls of the San Fernando Valley. We define the language we speak, literally. And the dictionary follows behind like a bloodhound on a trail, picking up the pronunciations, definitions and parts of speech and filing them away between its red leather covers. Though it is a handy reference and a big help when confronted with, say, pococurante or syllepsis, a dictionary is really just a snapshot of a language in constant motion.

If you don't believe me, read The Lexicographer's Dilemma by Jack Lynch. Books about English are a nerdy nonfiction sub-genre favorite of mine, and this is the best of the lot. In this book, Lynch explains how dictionaries are made, starting with the mother of them all, the Oxford English dictionary. The story of the OED is the story of English writ large, that crazy hodge podge generational undertaking for a crazy hodge podge language.

Because when the OED folks started to codify English (make lists of words and definitions) what they did was conduct massive and meticulous research into the way the words had been used throughout the ages. And they used those examples to construct their definitions. They didn't decide to define opalescent as 'having a milky iridescence.' They discovered that whenever opalescent was used, that's what it meant. And if we ever start using opalescent in a different sense and keep using it that way, the dictionary will re-write the definition. It won't redefine the word--English speakers would have already done that. The dictionary will merely record the change. That's its job.

Now, I love words a ridiculous amount, from those SAT monstrosities to the newest middle school slang. I love grammar. I love teaching writing. At the end of the day, I love meaning, and how it is constructed. It's one of those endlessly complex and fascinating aspects of the human experience. I can't get enough. So, when the aforementioned Spanish teacher, who was scoring mad points with her linguistics acumen, used irregardless instead of regardless later on in class, I shuddered. I'll admit. But, while I appreciate an excellent vocabulary and have pretty much dedicated my professional life to promoting the well-written sentence, I would not change a single thing about English. If irregardless comes into standard usage (it is currently listed as non-standard and dates back to the 1930s), I will not be one of the (many) people throwing my body between it and Websters. There are those who long for more rigidity in our mother tongue. As much as I love it, I'm not one of them. To try to fit English into a sturdier frame would be to rob it of its greatest strengths: it's responsiveness, its dizzying array of synonyms, its viral slang, its expansive, fascinating messiness.

So I told my Spanish class about the dictionary and why we don't have an academy. I stopped short of the OED, but just barely. I was a blaze of enthusiasm and a possible embarrassment to my friends. But I couldn't stop myself. It's why I'm writing to you now, perhaps a more receptive audience, before I tuck my inner Hermione back inside my head and wait for the next nerdy nonfiction book on English to make the rounds.