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The power of words: pressure, prejudice and politics in our vocabularies and dictionaries
Author(s) -
McARTHUR TOM
Publication year - 1986
Publication title -
world englishes
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.6
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1467-971X
pISSN - 0883-2919
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-971x.1986.tb00727.x
Subject(s) - sociocultural evolution , power (physics) , prejudice (legal term) , linguistics , politics , ethnic group , sociology , quality (philosophy) , subject (documents) , perception , epistemology , psychology , social psychology , computer science , political science , philosophy , law , physics , quantum mechanics , library science , anthropology
The use, nature, impact and general potency of words—whether in their free state or as listed in dictionaries—is too large a subject to cover in a paper of this length. I have therefore limited myself to five areas that I take to be fundamental in the issue of words as tokens or counters in the various power games that we consciously or unconsciously engage in. These areas are: First, bias and centricity (ego‐, ethno‐, Anglo‐ and so forth) in our thinking, our sociocultural dispositions, and our linguistic behavior; second, the inherently arbitrary and fictional aspect of words as contrasted with their capacity to influence us for good or for ill; third, the container‐like quality of words, through which each word carries a relatively determinate fragment of our sociocultural worldview, with the result that, although technical terms like ‘xenon’ can be easily defined, many other words—such as ‘word’ itself—are virtually impossible to define in a compact and comprehensive manner: fourth, the historical, cultural and technological factors that have predisposed us to make certain (often implicit) assumptions about what words are and what they do; and fifth, the possibility that, with a humane application of the discoveries of linguistics, we can improve our perceptions of such things as sociolinguistic centricity as well as our skill in minimizing the frictions of (often unintended) ethnic, sexist and elitist slurs.