Who Needs Aisles When You've Got a Blog?

Oh my word.

Pun intended!

In today's National Post:

London - Words associated with Christianity, the monarchy, and British history have been dropped from the Oxford Junior Dictionary.

Words such as "aisle", "bishop", "chapel", "empire", and "monarch" have been removed and replaced with words that include "blog", "broadband", and "celebrity". [...] Oxford University Press says the changes reflect the fact that Britain is a modern, multicultural, multi-faith society.

This brings to my mind two questions. First, how exactly is multiculturalism and multi-faith...ism(?) promoted by deleting dictionary entries specific to a particular culture or faith? The OUP justification is pretty flimsy here. Last time I checked, diversity isn't served or promoted (or enacted!) by means of suppression. I'd use a "that's like saying..." example here, but the only ones I could think of were inappropriately extreme. I'm learning to check myself. So.

And second...does any child really need to go to the dictionary to know what a blog is? Are these additions really necessary? How, exactly, does the deliberate shrinking of vocabularies serve our kids? And not all these axed entries are words unique to the church - I can see legions of future children asking their mums what it means when the PA system calls for a cleanup in aisle three at the grocery store. Also axed this year was "abbey" - I can also see legions of future British children wondering what that big thing at Westminster is. And "empire", and "monarchy"...um. Yes, celebrities and "MP3 player" are far more important to understand than the very cornerstone of British history, society, and politics. Again...what kid needs a dictionary to tell them what an MP3 player is???

It has been a growing trend in the past decade or so for junior dictionaries, which are limited in terms of size in order to be easily used by small hands, to eliminate words that reflect the past (and the pastoral) in favour of urban, technological, and politically correct terms (who else finds it bitterly funny that "debate" was added this year to the OJD, while Christian and monarchist words were axed?). Look, I'm only twenty-four, and already I meet high-school kids who don't recognize words or concepts that are normal general knowledge to anyone my age. Sometimes I wonder if my generation is the last to be taught the old stories, to read things that our parents and grandparents read - stuff that's culturally important (and gramatically sound!). The reason I've been so taken recently with the works of Alastair Reynolds is that he one of the few remaining artists who works off of learning from what's come before, which elevates his stuff above the average crap in the Amazon.com sci-fi listings. The end result of this handing down of stories and learning is that even fluffy, uber-contemporary, pop-fantasy books, like Jim Butcher's paranormal detective series The Dresden Files, can make a (hilarious) connection with the richness of the past by saying things like, "Spenser never mentioned that the Faerie Queen had such a nice ass." Incidentally, The Faerie Queen is public domain, and you can legally download a very nice translation for free - this, to me, is what the past meeting the future should be.

Some days, I feel like the well-educated Geico Caveman is but the cruellest of ironic satires. Today is one of those days.