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April 25, 2006
Oldies but goldies pt.2
Here's another of my all-time favorite posts of the last two years. This one is from not quite a year ago and was my response to a rightwinger's attempt to go PC on a new thesaurus for supposedly having an anti-conservative bias.
Reading Comprehension 101:
Evan Coyne Maloney of Brain Terminal is a fuddy-duddy... er... conservative film maker who the New York Sun apparently calls "A Conservative Answer to Michael Moore". Given the high esteem in which Michael Moore is held by red necks, what follows probably shouldn't surprise anyone.
The bitter-ender Evan put up a post a few days ago, possibly at the urging of, that fossilized Queen of Snark, Cao (Evan credits the impetus for the post to a reader's suggestion), taking Roget's Thesaurus to task for their " New Millennium" Thesaurus's treatment of the words "liberal" and "conservative."
It seems Evan is unhappy with Roget's and compiles a couple lists to illustrate his beef:
...a reader suggested checking out Roget's synonyms for liberal. There are three different entries; here are the highlights:advanced, altruistic, avant-garde, beneficent, benevolent, bighearted, bounteous, bountiful, broad-minded, charitable, enlightened, exuberant, flexible, free, generous, good Joe, handsome, high-minded, humanistic, humanitarian, impartial, intelligent, interested, kind, left, lenient, magnanimous, open-hearted, philanthropic, rational, reasonable, Santa Claus, tolerant, unbiased, unbigoted, understanding, unprejudiced
And...
Compare that verbal fellatio with this, from the word conservative:
bitter-ender, fearful, fogyish, fossil, fuddy-duddy, inflexible, obstructionist, old fogy, reactionary, red-neck, stick-in-the-mud, timid, uncreative, undaring, unimaginative, white bread
Hmmm... Well, first of all, in their section titled How to Use a Thesaurus, Roget's publisher, Lexico Publishing Group, LLC, states the obvious, "Get to know the features of your thesaurus. By understanding the parts of the entries and any changes in typography, you will grasp the nuances of the reference book's text" (emphasis supplied). The very next line again states the obvious, "You will soon recognize that few words are exactly interchangeable." And again a little bit later, "Remember that no two words mean exactly the same thing. No two words are directly interchangeable. It is the subtle nuance and flavor of particular words that give the English language its rich and varied texture. We turn to a thesaurus to find different, more expressive ways of speaking and writing, but we must turn to a dictionary, a sophisticated semantic tool, to determine meaning."
Left unsaid, probably because anyone who needs it explained to them is probably incapable of using a Thesaurus correctly, is the fact that a Thesaurus is merely a compilation of popularly used alternate words. It is not a dictionary. Which obviously means that the editors of a Thesaurus don't sit down in a smoke-filled room with blank paper and pens to create a Thesaurus from scratch, replete with their own political biases.
Further, in the "How to" section, Lexico clearly points out that the search results are ranked by how commonly they are used. So if we go back and look at the Roget's results we see that the second grouping of "liberal" synonyms are words that are used less commonly than those in the first group, and those in the third group would be used even less commonly.
Now take a closer look at the second grouping of synonyms. Unlike the first and third groupings where the antonym is "conservative," the second group's antonym is "strict." Obviously that means that those synonyms were improperly compared to "conservative" by Evan and those rightwing blogs who referenced his story.
So then when we take another look at Evan's compilation of synonyms for "liberal" we see that many of them don't even belong there!
advanced,altruistic, avant-garde,beneficent,benevolent,bighearted,bounteous,bountiful, broad-minded,charitable, enlightened,exuberant, flexible,free,generous,good Joe,handsome, high-minded, humanistic, humanitarian, impartial, intelligent, interested,kind, left, lenient, magnanimous,open-hearted,philanthropic, rational, reasonable,Santa Claus, tolerant, unbiased, unbigoted, understanding, unprejudiced
Quite a difference, huh. Out of 38 words in Evan's list nearly half of them don't even belong there. Suddenly reactionary doesn't seem so out of place as a synonym of "conservative."
Posted by Kevin at April 25, 2006 07:59 AM
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