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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.
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Mmm. Malicious compliance.
Honestly, it’s pretty ingenious. If they can get their publishers to help push for appeal, then it’ll be worth it in the long run.
Ya, I get it… But now they’re actively participating in making the students education worse.
No doubt, it’s a lose/lose situation. But I find it quite sad for the innocent kids getting caught up in stupid adult stuff. And believe me… I use “adult” strictly to define age/authority position, not mental or maturity level.
innocent kids getting caught up in stupid adult stuff.
This describes what happens in pretty much every conflict ever.
And at least half of the time the conflicts start over “protecting kids” 🤦♂️
Yeah kids are probably bummed they can’t check out the dictionary. Maybe they can find an alternative way to look up words though.
I kinda would have been, but I had a dictionary at home so didn’t use the library one much.
Brother, we have this fancy new invention called “the internet”. You can literally go to any search engine and type “define: whatever word here” and boom, the definition and hundreds of online dictionaries will be RIGHT THERE.
Yeah, but I’m talking about if this happened to me when I was a kid.
They all have access to the Internet now. This would be much more detrimental to learning if other resources weren’t in everyone’s pocket.
Some of my best education in high school was learning to circumvent school network/internet censorship. I think the kids will be alright.
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Banning encyclopedias would be more like banning Wikipedia. Banning the dictionary is more like banning dictionary.com.
Yes, you are wrong. Wikipedia can both be divisive and be deceptively edited. It also has articles about subjects. A dictionary just lets a person know what a word (like ‘divisive’) means. Dictionaries are pretty important to education, especially for a child who likely has a smaller vocabulary than most adults.
Edit: Am I really being downvoted for touting the importance of dictionaries in education?
I would guess that people think that dictionaries play a secondary role compared to that of teachers and adults in explaining the meaning of words. Or maybe some think Wiki is without bias and flaw
But then again, this is just a guess, and I agree with your point to a degree, even if I think dictionaries are not that important in school
A secondary role, sure, but still a role. A teacher is not always around or may not know the answer, but if a dictionary is right there, the kid can look it up.
You can only hope so. However from looking in from Australia, America is going to shit at an accelerating pace.
Thwy remind me of the movie Idiocracy, something i once viewed as extreme and impossible but now plays as almost fact.
I get that it’s malicious compliance, but part of me thinks this is exactly what they want. The correct definition of words is what they are trying to keep from children. They are constantly misusing or abusing the English language to push their agenda. What better way to brainwash than remove the ability to find out what a word means?
So there’s this thing called the internet, which has dictionaries on it.
Also, 1984 is a great fiction novel, but the linguistics within it is more than a little shoddy. Not to mention, Republicans are not as smart as you think they are.
If you think internet censorship is going to stop at porn you’re in for a surprise. It’s the testing ground.
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:
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
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’.
Just to chime in here again to you and the person you’re replying to. Maybe you can both lament with me. I learned many words the same way, having a parent that would grab a dictionary, and I do the same thing as a parent.
Let’s take a second to pour one out for the words we learned serendipitously, just flipping through the dictionary for fun, or an encyclopedia, or just the library stacks.
In so many ways, search engines, algorithms, and memes have robbed us of this.
Yeah you never forget your first Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.
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.
I think you’ve confused how often average people consult a dictionary with how often working professionals do.
My point is that not having access to a dictionary does not massively reduce one’s ability to learn their own native language, not that dictionaries aren’t useful.
I actually majored in Linguistics and will eventually wind up doing a Ph.D in it because I’m a horrific nerd. I love dictionaries and consult them literally every day for etymology information. That doesn’t change the fact that, as I said, the absolute vast majority of someone’s linguistic knowledge of their own native language is gained by observing the language used in context, not by explicit lookups in a dictionary. You don’t teach a baby to speak by throwing a dictionary at it; you just talk to it and they figure it out.
I agree. Kids are sponges. They learn by hearing.
My youngest was 16 months old and I swear I was having full kn conversations with her. She couldn’t speak, but she could gesture and match my tone. She clearly understood just about everything I was saying.
I’ve always liked linguistics. Delved into very superficially in law school in the context of statutory interpretation. Plenty of legal people have written a ton about it, but I found the linguistic analyses very interesting.
Anyway, since you majored, I’m still not really clear on what you mean by how the newspeak in 1984 is not realistic for dystopian predictions (summarizing) because it’s not how linguistics work. Can you elaborate?
It’s like with war and how the victor writes the history of it; the victor might also write the dictionary by shaping the majority lexicon. Part of the fascist toolkit is coopting language to prevent subjugated people from having the tools to resist.
All this don’t say gay, don’t say trans stuff, book bannings, in the south. The attacks on critical race analysis. They didn’t their slaves how to read or write either, let alone how to organize a vote drive or something.
Unless I misunderstood you, what is so inherent about linguistics that stops a fascist from redefining a word or obfuscating it’s original meaning (in the mind of its hearer (forgot the term for this)) to serve a political end?
I’ve gotta dash, but essentially, the fundamental linguistic premise behind 1984 is this idea that, if people do not have a word to describe a thing, then they cannot meaningfully think about it.
This is, to put it simply, just not true. The greater concept is called linguistic relativism, or the theory that specific languages play a significant role in our general cognition, but outside of some very minor effects, evidence simply doesn’t support it. All human languages are essentially of equivalent complexity, and even in situations where a pidgin is created through language contact, it rapidly re-complicates into a fully developed language.
For a concrete example, the idea is that, by replacing ‘bad’ with ‘ungood’, people’s domain of thought will be meaningfully reduced. The problem is minds don’t actually give much of a shit about etymology. In practice, what would rapidly happen is that ‘ungood’ would come to simply be the word for ‘bad’ just as deeply as the word ‘bad’ is to us. To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, consider the word ‘discover’. When I say it, you might think of a new scientific discovery, an explorer finding new land, or something to that effect. What you probably do not think of is that is quite literally ‘dis-cover’, that is, to undo the act of covering something up. Etymology very rapidly gets disconnected from peoples’ internal sense of a word, and to that end, manipulating it doesn’t really do all that much.
To go back to Newspeak, it’s trivial to re-develop a word for ‘rebellion’ with something like ‘goodthink freeness’, which will quickly be internalized into meaning the same concept. The range of possible thought doesn’t actually get meaningfully reduced.
I promise you, they simply dont know what books they are banning. They come up with some criteria and then schools have to sort through their books to make sure they all comply. A graphic novel of the book of genesis got banned from my school district. I garuntee they did not intend for that to happen.
Seems like at the point you’ve banned dictionaries that you should stop and reconsider what you’re doing
Except that would violate their objective of increasing their electorate through the erosion of education.
The more educated people get, the more they understand how morally and intellectually bankrupt the political and social right is.
Sounds like some malicious compliance there just from the summary but maybe I still have too much faith in people.
Yeah, this is the district that keeps this deranged bigot, on the payroll, so I wouldn’t ascribe any good intentions to them…
Malicious compliance in my mind would be “We haven’t read all of these books completely, nor can we remember all the texts. Therefore we have to completely empty the library for review”
Could be exactly the argument for a dictionary. Have you read one front to back? Do you recall every single definition? No? Might better remove the dictionary. Definitely have to remove the bible.
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Honestly Ron probably wants everyone in his state to be dumber so they’ll vote for him
That’s not the “gotcha” it should be. If anything results in future generations becoming ignorant, gullible and uncritically docile towards authorities, that’s just the system working as intended.
Sounds like an Idiocracy
Not even remotely. That is just the production method of copious cheap labour. Just make them multiply uncontrolled by instilling a dislike of anything in the way of birth control, make them docile and exploitable by telling them that unions are evil and corporations are the best there is and their friends and make them unaware of better systems by limiting their education to how great their own country is (and absolutely nothing else).
That caste is then not who gets to run things. That burden lies upon the rich ones who actually enjoy private education and have all the money they don’t have to spend on fair wages etc.
Thats an excellent explanation.
I was making a lame joke about a movie.
Now i feel like an idiot
They should ban the bilble like some other districts did. There is sex, murder, incest and all kinds of inappropriate content in there. Makes conservatives go nuts.
Banning it would annoy them, but if they all just went missing without any fanfare then they wouldn’t notice; very few of them read it.
DeSantis makes the law, counties follow the law, the Bible gets banned.
Fox news: LiBeRaLs ArE bAnNiNg ThE bIbLe!!
Of course they had to get rid of the dictionary! It contained words like fellatio and evolution. It even contained evollatio which is the theory that man invented fellatio!
It also contains the filthy words penis, vagina, scrotum, vulva, and gay.
Ooh that’s deeply offensive
Teacher “look it up in a dictionary.” Student “We won’t have dictionaries outside of school.” Other student “we don’t have dictionaries /in/ school.”
2 years later… Melissa S Tafht has finally put together a new book, and what is this book about? All we know is that it is banned…
Oh yes, I started thinking, hey maybe we should write all the words we know. I’m getting older and I see my mother forgetting words so I wrote this book for her. But then, I started thinking, hmm what about kids who don’t know all the words? And people might actually come up with new ones. Anyway, I’m calling this “Words Book”.
This is a worrisome sign.
No it’s a good thing. Malicious Compliance will bite Desantis in the arse.
Really? People are going to destroy his political career over a dictionary?
From little acorns, mighty oak trees grow.
That sounds like something someone with a small acorn would say
Actually I have a couple of small acorns, thankyouverymuch
You are missing it.
They pulled the dictionary in malicious compliance it wasn’t that DeSantis ordered it pulled.
And DeSantis is destroying his own career
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Lol this will definitely improve test rates and IQ scores
I’m a HUGE fan of malicious compliance. When people do stupid shit like, for example, being religious—if you just make them AC TUALLY live with their maleficence, then they give up faster than any other method of confrontation. If women really had to kill a dove every time they menstruated, then it would lose a bit of popularity. LMFAO, just one of an ENDLESS (well, I guess it actually is finite) number of examples.
Leviticus 15:28-30 ESV But if she is cleansed of her discharge, she shall count for herself seven days, and after that she shall be clean. And on the eighth day she shall take two turtledoves or two pigeons and bring them to the priest, to the entrance of the tent of meeting. And the priest shall use one for a sin offering and the other for a burnt offering. And the priest shall make atonement for her before the Lord for her unclean discharge.
Edit: We’d probably run out of doves too. ><
Most Christians believe in the new law, which abolished sacrifice like that, so it’s not the trump card you think it is.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t call out religious inconsistencies, just make sure you know what you’re talking about, first.
Use turning the other cheek. That’s a basic tenet of Jesus, which highlights the hypocrisy of gun-toting Republican “Christians.”
Why would an infallible god need to revise its laws?
Serious answer from a non fundamentalist Christian: Because the old testament laws were intended for a specific society, to pave the way for Jesus. They were also a mix of religious rules and secular laws. They weren’t (all) intended to be universal moral laws that apply to all of humanity.
No-no… Jesus didn’t change the laws… He completed them! The rules are all still valid, they just don’t apply, except the ones that are convenient, or affect those people…
Because an infallible God is trying to herd very fallible people, which is way harder than trying to give a group of angry cats a bath.
He is also working through fallible people, which is why a personal relationship with Him is so important. That is essentially what Christ taught.
Just saying what their scriptures teach. You don’t have to believe it, but it is much more consistent than people claiming to be Christian would make it seem.
It was just a quick low effort example, but yes, you are correct. Take my upvote! LOL
One can always leaf through and pick any of the many examples of awful highlighted on the site: https://www.evilbible.com/
I’d also say, though, that most Christians will use any law, new or old, to support their hatred and evil. If they’re looking to support their bigotry or hatred, then any version of the bible is fair game. It’s only abolished when it’s inconvenient for them.
Sadly, I’ve had the misfortune of living in multiple areas with mega-churches. ><
But again, that’s not because they are Christians. Christianity for them is, at best, a veneer. A smokescreen. They are filled with fear and hate, and use whatever they can to justify it. They could be any religion or none at all, and would still act the same way.
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Hardly. Hate is a human trait, not a Christian one or any other religion.
My parents raised me in the church and then were surprised when I objected to all of the republicanisms. They decided that “the church was gay.”
Them : Be Christ like
Also them: no not like that
Exactly. They are no different than Moses’ people, trying to form God into an image they can live with. They don’t actually understand their own doctrine.
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That’s because they hate gays and are looking for justification, not because they believe in Christ and are seeking to become like him. Don’t mistake using religion as an excuse for actual religion. If it weren’t for the Bible, they’d cite something else.
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Some people who claim to be Christian, do. But hate is hardly limited to Christianity. It’s not a Scotsman fallacy if a core tenet of the group is being blatantly ignored. It’s only a Scotsman fallacy if the point has nothing to do with being in the group.
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