Thoughts on the first entry
I just finished reading the first entry and I thought it would be a good idea to express my thoughts on this whole cultural literacy idea before reading the other entries.
I think that this article was rather interesting. When I flip through pages in a normal dictionary, a lot of the words I see are unfamiliar and I don't have any desire to ever see them again. Dictionaries are great tools, but I think almost anyone could survive without ever seeing one. I use dictionaries often in my English class, but I doubt I will consistently use one after I graduate. However, I believe that a dictionary filled with cultural literacy would be very useful. This dictionary would include everyday language that would be used in everyday communication.
I think that it would be a very big challenge to determine what is common knowledge that everyone should know. The people composing this dictionary have many rules for forming the dictionary, but I think that it would be impossible to compose the perfect dictionary of cultural literacy. Common knowledge to some, is foreign knowledge to others. A good example of this occurred just minutes ago in during a conversation between me and my roommate. Here is the conversation that portrays this idea:
Me: "Where are you bro?"
Roommate: "By the bubbler in Coffman"
Me: "Where?"
Roommate: "By the bubbler in Coffman"
Me: "By the what?
Roommate: "The bubbler"
Me: "What's a bubbler?"
Roommate: "A water fountain. You seriously didn't know that Fargo?"
Me: "Never heard of that slang before bro"
So yeah, just some thoughts on that first entry. Now I'm excited to read more on about this dictionary!
Alex Christianson
Comments
I really like your response to this. I feel that it is so true that you can not make one dictionary that is full of common language. Common language for who?? There are so many different cultures, societies and communities just within America that all differ so much in common language and slang that you could hold never hold a person accountable for knowing it all. The regular old boring dictionary full of proper and correct language is probably the only way to go even though it is the most uninteresting. It is a sort of a tool to connect the country together so that we can all socialize.
Posted by: Jasmine Johnson | September 30, 2006 2:56 PM
Haha I really like that you added a dioluge example.It's so true though. I wrote about pretty much the same thing in my blog. How would the author decide what to put in or not? This book would have to be so huge if it included every such culture. Like in your example, here at the U or M we each even have our own cultural literacy just think about in our enitre world!
Posted by: kathryn grayson | October 1, 2006 11:11 PM
You gave a very good example! I have run into this same thing being here at the U. People from different regions have very different slang and I think it would be nearly impossible to create a print dictionary to keep up with it becuase the slang is always changing. This has been done somewhat online, though not formally. www.urbandictionary.com allows people to add definitions to slang terms. Although it isn't very reliable, its interesting to read sometimes!
Posted by: Kate Cowger | October 1, 2006 11:15 PM