Spanish Previous Lectures and Events

Words and Power Transcript

- Well hello everybody, it's a pleasure to see you all here. Welcome in particular to the general public that is coming from the outside. This is one of the first in-person events, in the middle of a very cruel and extenuating pandemic. It's good to see people alive and not this size on my screen but that also prompts me to say, if you have a cell phone, turn it off, so that we can all concentrate. This is the first of two events related to a joint venture between Bowdoin College in Maine and Amherst here in Massachusetts and this brings me to welcome all our wonderful friends who are coming from Bowdoin today for a visit, including a professor Margaret Boyle. This venture is a course on the history of Spanish language dictionaries, as instruments to understand power, to understand the changing nature of politics, of the language of society, of culture, of religion, dictionaries as a window or as a door to appreciate particular moments in time in the long line of a particular nation or a particular group. It is being co-taught every Tuesday and every Thursday here. It's a wonderful experiment, it's wonderful to have Amherst students with the Bowdoin students and vice versa. And these are two conversations that relate to this topic, to the topic of words in power. The first one is taking place here at Amherst. The second one will be exactly a week from now at Bowdoin at four o'clock. The class of Amherst is going to go and visit everybody on that end, they came this week. The first one, the first conversation is connected with, the three major events, there are many other events, but the three major events that have been shaking us to the core, the COVID-19 epidemic, what does that mean in terms of language? How has the language that we speak, not only in English, but in other parts of the world, but in English, especially because it's where we find ourselves changed? How does it reflect the mood of the time and the second one is the Me Too Movement. The third one, not in any particular sequence, is the Black Lives Matter. In other words, it is language in times of crisis. What does language do in order to respond to the junctures that force it to be more elastic or more constrained and on Tuesday next week, we are going to focus particularly on dictionaries as national traditions.

- Next Thursday.

- Next Thursday, as national traditions, to understand looking at the Spanish model in particular, how each dictionary in the making from 1492, when the very first grammar of the Spanish language by Nebrija was published, to the present, the change of vocabulary, who makes the dictionaries, how those dictionaries reflect the time or not of their production. Before I cede the words to Margaret, who's going to start, I want to also welcome all our virtual people who are connecting with us online, all over the world, through our channel. It's good to have this hybrid version. It allows us to both be very local and very global. This event is sponsored by the Spanish Department, the European Studies Department, Frost Library as well, as different entities at Bowdoin College. And without Margaret, I cede the mic to you, so to speak.

- Thank you Ilan, it is such a pleasure for me to be here, and it's a pleasure for me to be here with my students and thank you for being welcoming to all of us. So where I wanted to begin was just talking a little bit about the course that we've been designing and teaching over the last semester and what it has meant for me as a scholar to think about teaching dictionaries in this moment. When Ilan and I first talked about this, of course, I would have jumped at an opportunity to teach alongside a scholar that I really admire and to talk about words and books and language because this is what I love to do. But then what does it mean for us to think about dictionaries in the moment that we're all experiencing, again, kind of what Ilan has just talked about, but this idea of living with the pandemic and living with what people called the twin pandemics and also just thinking about how dictionaries allow us to cope with the realities of this moment and how they can capture or exclude how we see ourselves. So we've been talking a lot about what does it mean for a dictionary to exist during crisis and how it motivates us, the language that we use, the ways we see ourselves or don't in these volumes.

- I'd like to start with the concept of crisis. I am a native of Mexico and grew up there, or came of age in the 1970s and 1980s. And the word crisis, which comes from the Greek, it means decision or chance to make a choice, was a word that was frequent in the parlance of the time when I was growing up, but more than frequent, I would say it was, or it felt at that point, abused. Every other day we were in some sort of crisis. A crisis that had to do with the economy, a crisis that had to do with a political operation in the south in Chiapas and Yucatan, a crisis that had to do with a politician that was behaving erratically. There was something that didn't quite make sense. If a crisis is defined as the choice that one needs to make after a series of coordinates come together, this was too frequent, too regular. We were in a constant state of crisis, meaning we were just in no crisis, we were in a state of desperation, so to speak or always over the edge and I wonder, thinking recently from the Trump years, the last four years before the transition and the sedition in particular of a January 6, but with the arrival of this three points Margaret of the COVID and of the Me Too Movement, and the Black Lives Matter, if that kind of plateau of crisis has not moved North and become a state of life over here. It's interesting to think what is it that makes us always consider that we are in a time of crisis, and what language does or doesn't do connected with crisis.

- Yeah, no, I've really been enjoying the chance to think about kind of what crisis means to us in different points of our lives and then how we make sense of being in crisis. And so one thing that I see that's happening, that's really exciting is activism as a way of moving out of crisis, moving us forward in a certain way. And then the kinds of words that we use in activist movements, that again is about pushing us towards change and kind of a related thought is this idea of what happens when you don't have access to language at all and particularly, in this moment that we're all experiencing with them thinking not just about kind of this collective suffering, but for example, like health inequities and what happens in a hospital setting if you don't have access to English. There was a study that came out just recently about if you are a Spanish speaker, your quality of care, I mean, I don't think it's surprising to any of us, but just numerically to see it on paper that you are limited in this way because of the lack of access that you have to language. And then like, what do we do about this? And obviously in medical schools they're starting to have conversations about the importance of interpreters and translators or cross-cultural communication and training around that. And then what can dictionaries do to help support some of these conversations? That's another place where I'd love to spend some time.

- And in that respect, I wonder if the propensity that young people have these days, in this generation, to feeling the urge, to speak up, to protest, to see a direct line between their lives in the larger picture of the world has been transformed vis-a-vis previous generations, protest is a fixture of human life. But in what way are the protests that we are engaging in different from the ones before? And I would say that if there is an aspect, Margaret, there's the aspect that people know that you have to also change the language, not only the world, you have to change the language in order to change the work. It seems to me that in other periods of time, the idea that the change of the world will bring the change of the language was more embraced, but now the urgency is if you don't start by affecting, transforming, redefining your vocabulary, you're falling into the same patterns of racism, of xenophobia, of the oppression and so on. And so on the other hand I also feel that the dictionary as a unit, as an entity, as an object used to be more of a coffee table item that you had on the side, that on occasion you would go and look up to see what work meant for this or that, but the arrival of the dictionary into the internet life, where dictionaries are no longer only books, but they are online and thus alive, present with us and cannot be static. They have to be keeping up with our time, makes the OED, the Oxford English Dictionary, it makes the Merriam-Webster Dictionary feel much more urgently connected with the present tense, in a way that almost crisscrosses the line with being journalism or news itself and just a week ago the OED published their word of the year, vax, the vaccine. Merriam-Webster, I'm delighted to have and honored to have Peter Sokolowski here who is Editor-at-large of Merriam Webster and who I was very fortunate to co-teach a course here at Amherst as well. They also publish a regular at the end of the year, a word of the year, they have a podcast. They constantly are having a dialogue with the users and as we know, also the users feel that now they can send a letter to the guys at the OED or they can send the letter to Merriam-Webster to say, this word has to change, it no longer represents us. People see the dictionary as a mirror. It no longer represents us, we want the dictionary to be us.

- I think what Ilan is talking about is so reflective of the conversations that we've been having over the last couple of weeks that I'm just remembering the collection of links that I sent to all of you that are just these publications in the Times and the Atlantic where you're seeing people energized by the words that are appearing in the dictionary for the first time and some of this does have to do with COVID-19, some of it has to do with technology and us tracking the story of how it was an activist movement movement, or you know, a single woman complaining via a letter to say, we need to redefine how we think about racism and then we make a change and I think of myself as kind of an outsider to the field of lexicography, but have been so animated by learning about, who are the people involved with making these choices? And then as a faculty member who's kind of inundated with all of this training around diversity, equity and inclusion, how do we apply those questions to the group of people who are making the decisions around inclusion in a dictionary and how can we as a general public become more curious and interested in, who these individuals are that are making the decisions and how can we be certain or lobby for, if we want to be energized about it. But those folks are representing us and our interests and how we think dictionaries, what we think the representation ought to be.

- I would say let's put it this way dear friends. A dictionary is a mirror, as we were saying, but a dictionary is also a capsule of the time and place in which it was produced and a dictionary can also be a weapon or a tool, to create social and historical change. There is no group that achieves privilege or power without having control of language. Now the question is what do you do with that control of language? Do you sit plastically and disconnect from the rest of society or is that a privilege that you have, an invitation for others to be brought into the table and for that pool to be expanded like you were describing? Who is it that is putting the dictionaries together? Both Bowdoin in Amhurst have wonderful collections in their archives and special collections of old dictionaries and for some of us who have been spending time researching the history of dictionaries, we know that some of the early exercises, some of the early artifacts were produced by single individuals, kind of Renaissance men, like Samuel Johnson in the 18th century or Noah Webster, the other founding father in the United States, who are Americanized the English language in order to fit it with a project of a new nation that was becoming independent in 1776 and needed to have its own way of expression. But most, if not, all of the dictionaries that exist today, not all, but really, almost all our dictionary is produced by committee. There is a corporation, there's an institution. There are don scholars, individuals at Oxford or not too far from us in Springfield, Massachusetts, that are the ones that are going to put together the opinions of what comes in and what is left out. There is no complete dictionary ever, online or in print. Any ambition to be complete is utopian, because the moment a dictionary is published automatically, it leaves something out. And by living something out, it also has a kind of tango dance with society. Society pushes it to include something new and the dictionary includes it, but then something else is left out. It's what's in what's out and that inclusion and exclusion, I would say creates, every dictionary is its own doppelganger, its own double. Everything that went in should be all embracing, but everything that was left out is very notable and others will say, why isn't this word a thing? Why are we described in this particular fashion? So I would like to think for a second as an exercise of the words that COVID-19 has invited us to start using. Just about a year and a half ago, I don't think anybody would have said you're muted in the same way or let's Zoom or in social distancing or Coronarenialls, I don't know exactly how to pronounce it.

- Do you know this word, Ilan mentioned it to me?

- It's babies that were born during the COVID-19 period and who will one day be the ones making the dictionary. In other words, vax, the fact that the word vax, vaccination in mandate.

- Anti-vax.

- Anti-vax, those are words that have only come recently into our vocabulary in that are the result of the crisis.

- Yeah, so much generation. I want to go back to a point that Ilan was making a moment ago about what we include and don't include from dictionaries and how we might respond to that. I've been following this project called the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. I don't know if any of you are familiar with it, Simon and Schuster is about to publish a print edition and actually just a couple of days, but this started as an online project and it really has just fascinated me. And so the premise I'm going to read to you, is to give original definitions, aim to give a name to emotions we all might experience, but yet don't have a word for. So it's a dictionary of words that don't exist, right? And here's an example, so there's this word he created called saunder not a word we use, but it's to describe, "A realization that everyone has a story "as vivid and complex as your own." And there's something so relatable about all of these words and emotions and experiences that he's created, that there has just been this massive, kind of engagement with the project and it a project that's been happening the last 11 years. So it started kind of crowdsourcing on a website. Then he created a YouTube channel that has these kinds of short, beautiful videos that describe the experience of the words. And now they're going to publish this book and it will have the definitions along with some images I'm sure to draw you in. And I'm really curious about the project again, because of the way that it kind of changes the conversation that we're having about dictionaries, as like a rarefied object or the book that you don't touch that's up high on a wall that is protected or it's official I feel like that's language that we've all been using, but this is something that like is representing experiences that we don't have words for, it's inclusive, and it's engaging you with the format of being both visual and written down. And I feel like I also relate that to kind of the experience of being bilingual in a certain way and how that is represented or isn't by dictionaries and kind of the dance that you do between one language and the other and when it happens to you that you use certain words and it doesn't quite express what it is that you first wanted to say in the other language. Yeah, so these are some of the things I'm thinking about right now.

- One of the questions that arises Margaret, from what you're saying is, where the words come from and what prompts a certain word to become a reality. How long does it take for a word to travel from the moment in which it is first uttered to the moment it is registered in a dictionary? And the moment it is registered in the dictionary, does it mean that the word has become official? What is it that makes the word a official? Meaning it has been embraced, it is now part of the establishment and maybe we can start rebelling against that word because it is now accepted but you know, this poses a number of questions that are at the same time very kind of provocative, younger people tend to be more liberal, more creative, more flexible when it comes to language and they can invent all sorts of words. When does the word invented by the youth of a particular time become solid enough in order to be transported to be recognized, take the word frenemy, a word that it came from the fringes of society from social media, perhaps, or from a certain type of youth that eventually travels to become a more established word. The word frenemy makes me think of what you were thinking of the dictionary that Simon and Schuster is about to publish because being a reader and admirer Margaret of Spinoza. Spinoza, this wonderful Jewish thinker of the 16th century, Amsterdam, did something that to me seems still absolutely revolutionary. He made a list of all the human emotions. I think it's revolutionary because I invite you to tell me how many human emotions are there. I have tried this in my class and people can go from five basic emotions or seven basic emotions to 35, 40, 100, how are we to define and to catalog and to list and to contain the amount of emotions that are there? Love, hate, is melancholy one? But think of the word frenemy. Frenemy here is actually combining two forms of human emotion. The fact that you feel anger or hate toward somebody, it's an enemy in the fact that you feel love or friendship to a person and so that emotion is now synchrotized or combined into this new word would that mean that contemporary emotions are more complicated that we tend to turn them into synthetic presences rather than love, hate, friendship, enemy?

- I think you're doing a disservice to our antecedents.

- Another aspect that I think it's important is to notice that every language has its own dictionaries, obviously, not all languages have the same amount of dictionaries or the same type of dictionaries. I was always, as an immigrant from Mexico puzzled upon arriving to the United States by the thesaurus, that all of you English language speakers have. A thesaurus is a kind of dictionary of synonyms and antonyms and other such words. We don't have something like that in Spanish. I have seen recently some dictionaries of synonyms, but nobody uses them and the word thesaurus is used in Spanish very differently. A thesoro can be the treasure or it can be, kind of a synonym for the word dictionary tip. Which is really a dictionary in and of itself. But I was thinking of this because in Spanish, we have the difference between a mask and tapabocas, which only covers your mouth. This is not a mask, this is a tabapocas, meaning it covers only my mouth. So in Mexico, there's no movement against masks. There's only movement against tapabocas, It's a very different approach. It's kind of shorter because of the size, the rhetoric is different. And you know, in a country like Mexico where masks play very important role, autabiopas has an entire book about masks. We have degrees of masks, the wrestlers mask, the party mask, the tapabocas, the mask that only covers your eyes, whereas in English, unless I am going to be corrected and I hope so, there's, the mask, please correct me.

- Yeah, I can't think of another word that we use in English to talk about mask. I mean, so we have the verb form, right, that we're masking and that's interesting too. I wanted to bring us back to kind of contemporary literature and how it's representing the dictionary. With many of our students, we just finished reading at least excerpts of Dictionary of the Lost words, the Pip Williams novel that came out earlier this year. And this is another place that I feel like it had to be published in the last couple of years, particularly for the interest in gender and then the interest in race and for those of you who aren't familiar with the book, it's fascinating. And, and for those of you who love archives as much as I do too, the idea is to retell the story of the making of the OED, first based on real archival exploration, but then imagining what it would have been like from a young female perspective and that's our narrator, who we get to know over the course of the novel and then her relationship with an enslaved young girl, and then the two of them in different moments, having conversations with each other about the words that their parents won't explain to them, or that are excluded from the dictionary. And then fiction kind of allows us to experience what it might be like to make a dictionary and also to imagine of course, what it would have been like to make the dictionary in a different way. And that's kind of the exciting place that I want to think, you know, for all of us that love literature and love fiction, what it can do to embolden us as activists or as people who just want to make change in the world and feel like language is representing the place where we want to live.

- The reading of the book by Pip Williams was inspiring to me for the many reasons that you've mentioned, the perspective of women being in charge only recently, do we see a change in who is making the dictionary. It is more diverse, it is more heterogeneous. I was commenting to you and to some of our students that I now serve as a consultant of the OED and they are interested in publishing, in the next three years or four years, to any five words that are from the Spanish, Mexican-Spanish that need to be inserted, after that it will be from Cuban-Spanish and from Puerto Rican-Spanish, and they want to make a statement about the inclusion of those words. And it's not words only that come from Mexico but from Mexican-Americans or Puerto Ricans in the mainland, or from Cubans in the mainland, et cetera. And the person who assigned to me the commission is somebody from the Philippines. It's has been a wonderful experience to see that visit very blunt, white male-ish vision of the OED is no more or at least, not from my own perspective. I go to Oxford every year but I have not spent that much time within the hallways of the OED. Still there is an attempt to reflect what the rest of the English language beyond England, because the OED is a global dictionary. It comes from Oxford, but it's really read all over and it's evangelical in its nature, by coming from Oxford, but spreading all over the world, it has the impact of the language that is coming from Oxford will permeate other parts of the world. But I like that reading Margaret because it made me think of the dictionary itself as a form of fiction. Even the dictionary that is not fiction or fictional, just for the very first person to imagine the compilation of words into a dictionary, the exercise of the imagination had to really go far that you could catalog and define and then disseminate these books that would not have a character that would not be about the history of the England or the history of France, but it would be about the language itself and the words themselves would be the characters of that book. It seems to me at delicious exquisite idea, at the same time, I was thinking connected with that reading that we did and your comment, that only recently the dictionary has become a character in literature too. There are for instance, in Latin America, then the dictionary in the encyclopedia. There's a wonderful book by Roberto Bolano from Chile that is called the Nazi Encyclopedia or the Encyclopedia of Nazi Literature in the America. It's a very Borgesian story, he invents an entire bookshelf of the Nazi novels, short stories, political treatises, et cetera, that he organizes, he criticizes and it's all in a very systematic way. There is a book that was published in Serbia called the Dictionary of the Kaisers, that actually was published in two simultaneous editions, a male edition and a female edition. And it was all a novel in the form of a dictionary. You had to go from the first definition that had some information about a character with footnotes to the second that led you to another character. The form of the dictionary itself is now inviting fiction to think about it. And I think that that shows a certain maturity of the culture in connection with the dictionary that the dictionary, as we were saying, is no more that dusty artifact, but now an organic entity in the memory of that society.

- Yeah, so we have more possibility to directly engage with the dictionary as object, the dictionary is process. So Ilan just shared a lot, I'm going to respond to a couple of aspects of it. So first is the piece about how Spanish is impacting English language dictionary and I have been very curious about this kind of as a bilingual person, as a Spanish professor, how will this shape dictionaries and actually, I didn't realize what ilan was going to share with us, that actually there's this plan already in place to see the words that will be adopted, little by little into the OED. But when we think about the numbers and again, I just want to share this with you. I just share these same facts with the Dean at Bowdion in defense of the Spanish Department, but just to think about the prominence of Spanish in the United States but obviously we know it's the second most common language, but just this projected data of where we'll be in 2050. So we're expected to have 138 million Spanish speakers in the United States and that we would then be the largest Spanish speaking country in the world. And then what does that mean for the dictionaries that circulate in the United States? So you said 20 words or 25 words?

- [Ilan] It's 25 words.

- It feels to me like we're going to need a whole lot more than 25 words.

- They asked me to compel 150 that they reduced to 25 that are the ones that are being defined right now. I mean, your point holds, obviously.

- So I feel like there's a lot of projects that we could talk about, so the English language dictionary that has the Spanish words that are now in common circulation or what does it mean to have that Spanglish dictionary which Ilan has had a couple of different iterations of, but will we have a editorial board that works on the Spanglish dictionary as this large scale project that circulates and I feel like there's just a lot that we can imagine and the change is going to happen so quickly. And then thinking about Spanish literature in particular, I wanted to share a short story which is one that I read in college and it was what made me decide I was definitely going to become a Spanish major. And so I'm sharing it because I love the story in general, but also because a dictionary shows up in it and it's Julio Cortazar's Axolotl, I don't know if you're familiar with it already, but so it's the story of a young man. He goes to an aquarium every day. He sees these tiny salamanders that are called axolotls and he kind of becomes obsessed with them and he's staring at them through the glass. And then the narration breaks down in interesting ways. And he's starting to lose track of who he is as a person. Is he a person, is he an axolotl? And so you see you have all these questions you can dig into about identity and colonization and mortality and who's watching who, but right at the start of the story, what he does, I think right after the first time he visits the aquarium is he goes to the library and he checks out a dictionary and he looks how axolotl is defined. And I think that that moment of the story is so interesting because it's another example of kind of how the literature shows us something that we know about ourselves when we want to understand something that we don't really know about in the world, or we want to understand some facet of our interior life, then we might go to the dictionary first and look up, you know, what, what does this mean and how does that allow me to better understand my place in the world?

- This makes me think Margaret as a way of wrapping things up here in opening it to the wonderful audience, of a relative of mine who started experiencing a series of symptoms that were difficult to define and to describe and yet, very clearly felt. She would go to the doctors who would be puzzled or would ignore her and she would always leave the office, the doctor's office with a sense that there was something strange with her, but there was nothing concrete or definable that she could tackle and her biggest quest, at least at the beginning of her illness was to name the illness, to be able to recognize it as something that she could touch. The word would give her the sense that this is what she has. And even if that is a little abstract in and of itself, that, the name itself, the identity, the definition of the illness grounded her, gave her a sense of an anchor that would allow her to say, okay, from here on, I can tap and tackle this. And that is I think what a dictionary also does. When my father would say you don't know what that means, go look it up in the dictionary and then that was a way to remember the word and also there was this oracular book that would be able to define the word. You could resist how it was defined in Spanish. There's a lot of tension between how the words are defined by Spain and how they are received in Latin America, and that feels as something that has not yet been fully digested, but the dictionary for better or worse is the authority at a time like ours, where we test authority to the core that tells us even in spite of ourselves, what we need to know in order to rebel or to embrace, or to simply be able to acknowledge the reality as such, we can live in a world that we cannot define and defining the world itself is challenging because we've talked about it in the class. How do you define the word law? It's so complicated, the word itself. It's always going to be very elusive and very dramatic. And one last thought on this, Margaret, I wonder, you know, we have the Urban Dictionary. You can put a word on line right now, and you can have 20 different definitions. There's a lot of plagiarism between those pages. You know, the same definition will show up in another one at a time when we say you have to have your own creativity, but people need to pursue that dictionary. The question is, and I speak now as a publisher, will it come a time when the printed edition will no longer be needed, when only the online version is what is available, maybe it won't occur. As a publisher I'm hoping it won't occur.

- I hope not too, yeah.

- But there is no doubt and maybe Peter can tell us a little more this that I would say, this is non-official that nine out of 10 people that are looking up the Merriam-Webster are looking it up online and one is, I have no idea what the equation there is, but it has to be that many, many, many more people are doing this online automatically so much so, that many of my students not always know how to alphabetized things. I mean to go from one section to another and say--

- Not my students they're really good at it.

- Your students, I know they know perfectly about it, but I did an exercise not too long ago with high school students of looking up things in dictionaries and it took them a while to figure out that the L comes, et cetera. Online, you don't have to do it. So the question is, where are we at this present time? Who is behind our dictionaries? How can we make those dictionaries still trustworthy but more inclusive, though recognizing that inclusion is always an elusive entity and inclusion means exclusion. When you include somebody, you exclude somebody too, it's inevitable. If you included everybody, you wouldn't have a dictionary because no such dictionary exists. Maybe we open it up.

- Yeah we can open it up and I'll just say briefly, but kind of the piece about medicine and it just reminds me of conversations we've had about diagnosis as this limiting factor too right, and so you kind of see the same thing in terms of a conversation between patients and providers, either really clinging to that they have a term that they can use to describe their condition or thinking it's no longer adequate, but yes, we can make ourselves quiet, so you're welcome.

- Can we have a microphone here? We're in a small room and it seems redundant. However, there are people that are looking from everywhere somewhere else through the camera and they want to hear, so Will have offered to bring the mic to you and it's just so that people can hear you in other places, there's one question right here, thank you.

- Okay, well, it's been a second since I've spoken into a microphone. I guess my question has to do with languages that maybe don't have a dictionary yet. Obviously you've published some Spanglish dictionaries. So I'm curious, you've briefly touched on this, that power dynamic of dictionaries as a sort of authority, as maybe a place to be able to articulate like an illness, you've touched on this a lot but I guess I'm just kind of wondering explicitly what you see as the advantages of taking maybe an oral language and codifying it through a dictionary and some of the disadvantages and how moving forward places that don't have dictionaries, who does that, how does that happen, that's my question.

- I want to answer it, but then I want to kind of open it up too. I compiled at the beginning of the 2000s a dictionary of Spanglish. It was really a project that came from one of my Amherst students who was kind of pushing me to be less hypocritical as a professor and more authentic. And I'd say this in all honestly, I think, you know, the traditional view is that knowledge goes this way but actually knowledge goes the other way even more frequently. And he used to tell me that I spoke Spanglish on the hallways, but a very methodical and clean Spanish in the classroom and if I felt bipolar? And the question was amazing and I did feel bipolar and that kind of prompted me to start thinking, well, what is this thing Spanglish about? And can it be quantified at some point? And have we reached a certain moment of maturity for it to have its own dictionary? And the answer that I have here is at what level of the development of a language is there enough maturity? enough forces within for it to be codified? I can tell you without a hint of humor here that I felt like a thief. I felt that my duty was to a codify the Spanglish language, by simply saying the Spanglish language I was already establishing that it was a language, there were many of my colleagues at that time who did not think it wasn't language and that by codifying it I was granting it alleged legitimacy that it didn't have and it shouldn't have. That I was allowing broken Spanish to be seen seriously. And that was the wrong message to students and to general, people who should be studying real, non-broken Spanish. As a thief, because I'm white, I teach at a place like Amherst, who am I to go around this country and codifying the words that not really belong to me, they belong to the people, but Borges says in a wonderful story called Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote that there's no intellectual exercise that is not an a theft in some way. And I think that dictionary makers, like sycocographers are thieves with a purpose that has to do of helping society understand the history of the language and formalizing it. But here, I want to bring the person that you have to your left. Yousef and I mentioned him in the morning, he is my student who is writing a thesis about the oral language of Morocco that is not recognized as a language and there have been attempts to write dictionaries in Darija and the question is, maybe Yousef can say a thing or two about, by having an official dictionary, would that make it a language of Morocco? Would the powers of Morocco, the king and the political establishment accept it instead of official Arabic? You want to say something, Yousef, just in a few words?

- Sure, yeah, it's a complicated question that I've grappled a lot with because I came in with the idea that that was the ultimate objective to codify it in order for it to gain legitimacy. And then on the way I learned that it had already been codified by this one person that had undertaken this project and had a lot of influence in Morocco and they put some linguists together and they decided to create a grammar and to create a dictionary. But then I found out that that codification remained at a distance from the way that it was spoken in the streets. And so that the act of codification in itself isn't what brings the legitimacy. That there's another factor which isn't usually recognized as bringing that legitimacy and its creativity, like the work of the people that write in that language or that singing it or that simply creating it. And that's an actor that allows the people that speak it, to recognize the language as capable. And so once that happens usually is when the language is developed enough for it to be codified. That's what I personally have found from the research that I've done and from the conversations I've had.

- I love what you've been doing in your thesis and I love that comment, the language doesn't belong to lexicographers, it doesn't belong to dictionary makers. It belongs to the people who create it and who create with it and after that, it's the dictionary makers that will do something with it. So I mean, I think it's a complicated question, but many dialects, many slang, codes of communication don't have dictionaries. There are many languages in the Americas that never had a dictionary and are now disappearing. Had they had a dictionary, we would know a lot about them, so it's a give and take, a challenge.

- Yeah, I think it's such an important question and that's been interesting for me as a person, pushed into academia and to think about what Ilan's work around Spanglish did for my own identity. So my mom is Mexican, I grew up speaking English and having kind of an uneasy relationship with Spanish until later in life I became bilingual and now I'm a Spanish professor and I still think I will never have the perfect bilingualism that I want to teach to my students, but I think what Ilan has done with his work and many others at this point have kind of validated that this is a legitimate form of expression and it's kind of just circled back to your idea about creativity to think like how in popular culture now, and this is also like very recent, the last five and 10 years, you think about how Spanglish shows up on TV and in music and what that does to kind of celebrate the language practices that we have. And one other detail that your question reminds me of is, that we were in Special Collections at Amherst this afternoon and we're learning about how the library has been intentionally acquiring dictionaries of indigenous languages. So these are not new dictionaries, but old dictionaries, but how important it is for libraries to do this work and have the representation and what that does to kind of lift up the culture and language practices broadly.

- Yes.

- Sorry, this is going to vary slightly from dictionaries, but it'll come back I promise. So professor Boyle earlier in the talk, you kind of brought up the idea of language, especially in context of medicine and diagnosing different patients and I was just wondering, I know in our class, both this semester and last, we talked a little bit about the power of language in context of translating. And I think that you could connect this to dictionaries and say, like with the example from the Special Collections earlier with the definition of oats. But I think I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about kind of what power dynamics are inherent in like medical systems, also in dictionaries when you have to require that translator to advocate for someone else.

- Yeah, thank you for bringing up that question, Julia, and I think we kind of talk, tried to touch on it a little bit at the beginning of the talk, but I love circling back to it and so I think it's about translation. We see so much now about like the importance of access to interpreters that are trained in a variety of languages. There's this idea, can a computer be an adequate kind of interpreter in a setting like, like a hospital that's full of crisis, right? Not just 'cause of the physical toll, but the kind of emotional experience that arises out of an emergency and then just to think more about, I'm trying to think where I wanted to go with this. Oh, and to get us back to this idea of diagnosis too, and what, what it means when the language is limiting, how the experience is described and how you might push back on that. Another topic that I've been really interested in is kind of watching how medical textbooks have evolved over the last couple of years and the kind of urgency around changing the words that you use to describe different conditions. The illustrations that you use to describe anatomy and how that will shape our medical practices.

- So this isn't like a really well fleshed out question, but thinking about like how large the United States is and how much like our language varies, like across states, like, let's say like someone from Massachusetts or Boston, speaking to somebody from like Texas or Louisiana, like the variation in language there and how people say things and what people mean, like, do you think that that as like such a large nation is like dividing us to some degree and has led to the crisis that we're seeing now, especially with the pandemic and like, you see a lot of like anti-maskers are in the South and like people who, you know, want get vaccinated are in the North, obviously that's really like all across the board, but I feel like I see trends there. So what do you guys think about that with respect to language and dictionaries?

- It's a wonderful question Hanna, and I was part of a panel recently at the Brookings Institution about the word Latinx and what people feel. Some of you have read what I've written. I understand the purpose of Latinx, but I think that the language has to come from the people. Only 3% of Latinos in the United States use the word Latinx. We are 60 million, 3% is roughly a million and a half. Most of that probably is in academia, which is not to say that I think that the word is legitimate, but it feels to me imposed by the educated elite. But the point is this, if you're a Republican, you use the word Hispanic. If you're a Democrat, you use the word Latinx. I mean, that's the same group, I think, but the dividing language is dramatic and the tension also. Many, many progressives will not use the word Hispanic in many Republicans, conservatives will not use the word Latinx and that is just one term of the way we relate to one another. If you amplify that through the different local regions that you were talking about, Texas and Massachusetts, and you can feel that the vitality of the language, but you know, a nation of this many millions of people, it's almost a 19th century idea. Frankly, just like big corporations are in trouble for being big, big nations have trouble, looking at where we are with COVID, how difficult it is to bring everybody together. A smaller nation of 3 million, 5 million, is easier to handle, you'll never have everybody on board, but 350 million people is very difficult to put all together, on the other hand, you can say, this is wonderful, there are two views of who Latinos or Latinx or Hispanics are. We don't all want to be the same. It's the more plurality, the more richness there is. So there's a tension between coming us all together and still have the same language and then having the same language that is falling apart and it's not allowing us to communicate with one another.

- And then I think that we see that a little bit around, like I read an article recently just about using words like BIPOC or thinking about gender neutrality in English or in Spanish and this fear that I think a lot of progressives have that, are you using the right terminology and can that allow you to have the connections in the conversations that you want to have and your question, Emma, also reminds me of talking with Saluda America! that's based out of Texas and the work that they've been doing, and I mean, it's an organization that exists to pre-COVID, but especially in the last couple of years, producing information in English and Spanish, that would allow people to build up the trust necessary to follow the recommendations of their physicians or get the medical care that they needed and how that meant working across languages or how that meant changing the definitions of words that they were using.

- Emma, one more thought, because we've been engaged in this wonderful conversation, both in Amherst, and it's really been just terrific. I've been teaching for 28 years, just at Amherst. And you know, that thing that I was saying at the beginning, that it's astonishing how your generation is very aware that if we don't change language, we don't change the world. We have to change the language. It's also and I say this with utter respect and admiration, it's a generation that doesn't want to say the wrong word at the wrong time. And thus it's sometimes walks on egg shells. Just as exercises, I can have a group say, okay, let's talk about race today and people immediately get paralyzed, because if you're going to say the wrong thing, once you leave the classroom there's going to be a lot of energy that is going to circulate. And so just as we know how important language is, we also know that we can be paralyzed by language and that certain things can push us in awkward directions. And again, I say this because I think my students, all of you are incredibly courageous in many ways and marching but it's also a fear of saying the wrong thing on social media and being canceled or in class, it can all play a very important role. Maybe opportunity for one last question? These guys have to go back to laboratory, yes, Haran.

- Hi, I think of what a wonderful conversation, I really enjoy it, my question relates to not only the content that is being included, what words are included and excluded in the dictionary, but also how they're included, also how they're arranged in a dictionary. The default mode that I guess the English speaking world would accept a dictionary is to organize words by alphabet, right, alphabetically, but as a Chinese speaker there are different kinds of ways of organizing different kinds of words, which might create different kinds of categories in our thought. If we were to employ the analogy or this doctrine that basically the parameters of your language is the parameter of over thought, similar things could be applied that the categories of your language implies the categories of your thought. So I wonder if there has been any attempt, at least in a scholarly academia or in a publishing field to explore different kinds of ways to organize the words in the dictionary that are not really alphabetized, not really by sound, but by the meaning or by the connections. For example, we see online dictionary, one of the advantages presented there is that you have the trend words. That fundamentally changes how people look through a collection of words. You click into the highest trend and then you click to the second highest trend. In Chinese, Ancient Chinese, the words are sometimes defined using poems. I'm a poet, I investigate different kinds of, sort of how languages are defined within the relative usages and the collection of poetry contains the meaning of the languages in a very organized and a very visual way as well. So I wonder if there has been any thoughts to ponder upon that, yeah.

- Your question is kind of reminding me of conversations we've had about what it means to use an online dictionary where it doesn't require that kind of alphabetization, but also how you have access instantly to the popular or words that people are engaging with and how that kind of shifts the way that you're accessing information and also the project that I mentioned earlier, that's kind of engaging you to think about not just words but also kind of images or sometimes even videos, just as another way of organizing information. But I do think the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is ultimately alphabetical.

- I also want to echo just like Margaret did Haran, the wonderfully provocative question that you are asking and that pushes us to see our language English, always imperial, even in spite of itself, to be more humble. It's not the way the world thinks and approaches itself. And there are other ways, I mean, not that Chinese is more humble or less humble, but an invitation here first to think how arbitrary the alphabet in and of itself is. Why is the letter A at the beginning and the letter Z at the end? It's just, why, why don't we start with the letter N? What made the letter A be the first? There's no logic, it has a history that goes back to Phoenician and Babylonian, et cetera, but it's a random approach to link to letters that has been accepted and it is the default mode. If we think back to Darija, if we think that we wanted to create a dictionary of oral Darija, not a written language, how do we catalog it? Do we catalog it by the first sound? Do we catalog it by the more frequent words? Do we catalog it by the way that a certain word is used in a particular context? And I would like to bring Peter here. I mean, you guys do the dictionary, the alphabet is the skeleton, the vertebrate, but the online takes different approaches. This is Peter Sokolowski of a Merriam-Webster, a wonderful lexicographer and the essential dictionary in the United States.

- Thank you, it's nice to be with you Ilan and you make me feel philosophical. But we should mention Isidore of Seville, maybe the sort of grandfather of the Western idea of a reference book, organized by subjects. You know, kinds of fish, kinds of vessels, you know, so in fact alphabetization was not the standard. The early dictionaries that were monolingual in English almost and as we discussed in our course, explained how the alphabet worked as part of the opening essay. You know, if the word begins with B, then you go to the B's. If there is a B and then an E you go down past the A's, which proves to us that alphabetical order was not universally understood and it was not the default method of organization. However, there's a great advantage which is that it requires no prior knowledge of the user and that's why it's become the default. Now, the original thesaurus and I mean, there have been a hundred wonderful points that you've made tonight, but one thing that just randomly came to mind is, I know in the French tradition, in which I was educated, there is also not an active thesaurus program as there is not in Spanish. I believe and this was just a theory, but I believe it's because translation is at the origin of the dictionary in English. The idea of a dictionary of English was to translate the hard words, which meant the Latin or the Greek and very often the French-based words, the French words, which were themselves essentially bad Latin. So translation was at the origin of the dictionary in English. The thesaurus therefore became an extension of this grouping of terms, some of which were the Anglo-Saxon terms and some of which were the classical terms, that's why we have words like brotherhood, but also words like fraternity in English. So why do we have two words, well, that's our problem. Other languages don't have that kind of incredible richness and maybe we would never use brotherhood in the same sentence that we'd use fraternity and yet semantically they're essentially identical. So that's why I believe there was a thesaurus tradition in English but what's even more interesting is that the thesaurus tradition in English was established entirely outside of alphabetical order and Roget organized them by groups, not by alphabet. I'm sort of proud to say that I believe the Merriam-Webster thesaurus was the first to reorganize it as a dictionary because that's sort of what we do and that's one of our best-selling books to this day. And to your point about print books, the print still sells a hell of a lot of books, so they're alive and well, not as healthy as they were, but never going away for sure.

- Yeah, good, good, good. Maybe we'll conclude by mentioning that in Spanish there's a marvelous book called A Hundred Years of Solitude, Cien Años de Soledad, but not a hundred years of loneliness. And there's a dramatic difference between solitude and loneliness. The richness of the language allows us to have the versatility of creating worlds within words, that they push us to think even about the same emotion, from different perspectives.

- Yeah and I just want to say thank you again for the question and also I think something important that you're doing is de-centering English as the language that we use when we talk about, I mean, we're using English right now, but when we talk about dictionaries it doesn't always have to be about English language dictionaries and that's been something so exciting about the course that we've established over the semester to really center the place of Spanish and trace the history into our present.

- Just to conclude I don't think it needs to be mentioned again, but dictionaries are not naive, are not ephemeral, dictionaries are charged. Can be weapons, can be tools and can be instruments of change. Dictionaries appear to be now very central to how we reclaim who we are. The best thing about dictionaries is that they are never finished. They're always in the process of making and they always need the young people, either as speakers and users or as ultimately makers and compilers in order to remain genuine and legitimate.

- Thank you for being here.