A Florida school district has literally banned the dictionary in an effort to comply with Gov. Ron DeSantis‘s ® book-banning law.
The Escambia County School District has reportedly removed over 2800 books from library shelves as they undergo a review process that will determine if they are inappropriate for students, according to Popular Information. Among the books currently relegated to storage are The American Heritage Children’s Dictionary, Webster’s Dictionary for Students, and Merriam-Webster’s Elementary Dictionary.
The district contends these texts could violate H.B. 1069, which DeSantis signed into law in May 2023.
I think they are dumb as a box of air, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want exactly this. Just because they are dumb makes it even more believable that they actually want this and think it will accomplish anything. One of them read 1984 and said “we should do that”. More probably, one of them watched 1984.
My point, which I guess I didn’t state as explicitly as I needed to, is that the entire linguistic premise of newspeak in 1984 is essentially nonsense. Language simply doesn’t work that way, and people’s understanding of words does not generally derive from dictionaries.
To pose a simple question to you, of all the words you know, how many of them did you learn by consulting a dictionary? Or perhaps even more simply, how many times have you looked at a dictionary in the past year?
For the vast majority of people, the answers are “a tiny fraction” and “single digits”.
I learned a huge number of words from dictionaries and vocabulary books in school. Some I learned from context in other books. All three are being banned. Discussions of certain words are also banned.
Further, it is not malicious compliance. It is CYA. When you do something they don’t like that’s not against the rules, they’ll pull this shit out as an excuse to can them. Then, they’ll ban the thing they didn’t like in the first place.
Last, the people around me would largely say I’m pretty smart (not a genius, but I know a fair amount and I’m fairly clever), some of that was just genetic and some of that was my home life, but a lot of that organization of learning and processes came from my formal education, which was all public schools and universities. I would not be anywhere near as successful now without it. Kids in Florida today are taking a hit. They won’t be as competitive as people from states where this isn’t happening.
When I was a wee lad reading something I would ask my parents what words meant and we would look it up in the dictionary. Eventually I just did it by myself so the answer to your question is “most of them”. I haven’t had to check my dictionary for some time recently but my Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary is still in a prominent place in my bookcase, right next to my Roget’s II.
Given that dictionaries are a relatively recent development in history, and yet people did manage to speak English, I can guarantee you that ‘most of them’ is a massive over-estimate.
To be clear, I’m not trying to imply that dictionaries aren’t useful or that them being inaccessible is a good thing, but the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of people’s linguistic knowledge is learned unconsciously through context and simply talking and hearing other people speak.
Just to throw it at you, of your first sentence there:
I would essentially guarantee you didn’t learn any of those words by looking them up in a dictionary, and you probably knew them all before you could even read, with the exception of ‘dictionary’.
I get where you are coming from, I do not think the people you are talking about have the mental aptitude to comprehend the problems with the book 1984, hence they would think it would be a good blueprint for control.