The death of the dictionary?

John Levett

In this issue, the word 'narratology' and its derivatives are used: it was a new word to me, and it occurred in a quotation. Now: I've been caught by words in quotes before. I once tended to assume that authors of articles would get their quotes right, and that it was no part of an editor's job to monitor copy submitted at one remove. As a consequence, and somehow subliminally, mind and eye conspired to assert that quotations need not be checked as scrupulously as direct text. Worse both went about this skimming process without reference to me. It is an occupational hazard, one of many for Geminis, this parallel processing, and exacerbated with the passing of the years. It's not the onset of that dreaded disease whose name, could I but think of it, is on everybody's lips, it is just that these small habits of mind make little grooves in the cerebellum, down which they run of their own accord, and without reference, often, to Mission Control. The result, in a famous case, was that MC missed a malapropism in a quote, and what should have been a reference to that kind of library which in Australia is largely the province of local government, emerged as something else again more in the lexicon of those new language-shapers, Kath and Kim. The author of the article has not spoken to me since, which I deeply regret. Good contributors are not all that readily forthcoming, and I have since learned to be wary of the spelling and meaning of words used in quotations. So when narratology popped up, I looked for it in my dictionaries. Not a trace. Spellchecker was similarly unhelpful: so I used that editorial prop '[sic]'. As it happened, this particular article had been evolving for a long time, partly in response to issues raised by a referee, and I sent the marked-up copy to the author just to be sure that we were both working on the same version of her article. And she replied, quite kindly, in relation to that 'sic':

There are 15 500 hits for 'narratology' in Google. There is even a dictionary of narratology. Is the guideline that it is not in a particular dictionary? or is there something else that I am missing here?

It wasn't she who was missing something... Of course, I had to check with Google, and I did: 10.4 seconds later it had found 10 400 references to narratology. It was plainly a very well established term, with a considerable body of literature, just a short scan of which allowed one to construe the meaning of the term. But what this experience confirms to me (yes, I am a slow learner, with a very poor teacher) is that language and the lexicon are evolving so rapidly that the conventional dictionary, even with supplements, whilst still enormously useful [and comforting], is no longer to be relied upon in the matter of neologisms and that whenever a new word is encountered, one will have to Ask Jeeves or check with Google to be sure that it is not an ad hoc fabrication.

This has implications not only for editors: indexers and classifiers, the compilers of lists of what used to be called 'subject headings' must also necessarily operate on the hyper-fringe of language. This works, up to a point: but how does one establish the meaning, etymology, provenance and authority of a term unknown to one's favourite dictionary and its supplements? I haven't found the answer yet, and suggestions would be gratefully received. No doubt there are online solutions, but they haven't revealed themselves to me, and until something better comes my way, I will just have to ask Google whenever I come across a word which is not in my dictionaries. This is both an exciting and discomfiting prospect, for in my ongoing search for enlightenment regarding narratology, Google led me to sites about words, and to a book review:

'David Crystal's Language and the internet; published by Cambridge University Press; pp272; ISBN 0-521-80212-1; publisher's price £13.95. Professor Crystal is editor of - among others - the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language and the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.'

The review was by a Michael Quinion, who is a man after - or before - my own heart, and he went on to say, of David Crystal,

He largely dismisses the common view that online communication (he calls it Netspeak) is illiterate and dumbed-down language. He agrees that much of it is non-standard, playful, highly deviant in bending the usual rules of language, tolerant of typographic and spelling errors, and full of new words. But he is fascinated by its variety and innovation and devotes much space to describing its special (and evolving) character. He takes a very positive view, suggesting that 'The phenomenon of Netspeak is going to change the way we think about language in a fundamental way, because it is a linguistic singularity - a genuine new medium'. http://www.quinion.com/words/reviews/langinternet.htm (Accessed 22 September 2003. Bookmark this URL! Order the book.)

No doubt this will be old hat to some, perhaps many, of my readers. But it is new to me, and it fills me with joy: I was coming to think that the abbreviated, compressed and colourless nature of text messaging was the shape of things to come, lexically speaking, closely followed by the anti-literacy of the graffitist and the clipped and elliptical content, laden with unexploded semantic bombs, of the e-mail. The extract from the review of Language and the internet argues otherwise, and I anticipate a rapid shift in my vocabulary at a time when I thought there was nothing new under the sun, lexicographically [it is a game we can all play] speaking.

Oh: whose article? Which of this issue's authors? Why don't you look for 'narratology' yourself? And be sure to add it to your spellchecker.

In this issue Irene Bonella gives us the good oil on pay inequity: 'we got equal pay once, and then we got it again, and now we still don't have it'. Jackie Bowler spells out some of the issues involved in unmediated [by librarians] document delivery, and notes that this shift will increase 'as libraries develop more user-oriented services that offer access to information regardless of its location.' Helen Hobbs and Tania Aspland take us through an actual process of embedding information literacy in a teacher education program, and incidentally give us some insights, for which we may or not be grateful, into the immensity of the challenges for anybody working in the tertiary sector, students, academics and librarians, after what - fifteen years? - of non-stop 'reform'. Bonna Jones offers a reflective and considered discourse on the importance of reading in an era of what she calls 'complex narrative forces'. Karen McQuigg, herself recently become deaf, challenges comfortable assumptions about whether or not the deaf should be regarded as a disabled group or a linguistic minority. In respect of public library services in one State, it seems it does not matter, because, essentially, there aren't any. Carolyn McSwiney responded to my argument that her 2002 IFLA paper on reference service in an age of cultural mobility deserved a wider audience, as she presses us to ask again [and always] 'who is my client?' A double handful of reviews closes the issue: our reviews editor is temporarily out of sorts. It's a seasonal disorder related to some kind of winter festival in Victoria and like the worthy members of the New York Yacht Club, he harbours fairly fixed views about the location of a certain piece of tin ware.

One last thing At the RAISS Conference in Melbourne in the immediate aftermath of September 11 and the 'Tampa Affair' I offered a challenge regarding the provision of library and information services to that disadvantaged group of self-assisted would-be migrants being put up, courtesy of the Federal Government, in various centres in and out of Australia. Alan Bundy, Kevin Dudeney and some others have responded courageously to that challenge: in brief, there aren't any. 'Leftovers and scraps' is the title of the group's report, and it is available on the University of South Australia's website http://www.unisa.edu.au/whatsnew.asp.

Where to from here, Alan?

A a