7 September 2005 >> “The last thing you want with a thesaurus is to offend anyone.”

So says Barbara Ann Kipfer, PhD, the online editor for Roget’s Thesaurus.

Roget’s recently scrubbed several offensive synonyms from the entry for Arab:

The entry, which appeared on thesaurus.com, listed the word as a noun meaning “beggar,” and gave 16 pejorative synonyms including “homeless person” and “welfare bum.”

Sounds pretty reasonable that these entries should be removed. Aside from being offensive, they simply aren’t accurate reflections of common linguistic usage.

“I looked it up and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” said Aref Assaf, president of the American Arab Forum[.]

I feel your pain, brother. You should check out all the derogatory synonyms that Roget’s is still listing for the word conservative.

15 May 2005 @ 12:32PM >> David Clemens, a professor at Monterey Peninsula College, wrote in to comment on the recent discussion on Roget’s New Millenium Thesaurus:

Hi, Evan,

The Roget’s synonyms for “liberal” and “conservative” reveal a sloppy methodology.

Dictionaries and thesauri are either “descriptive” (telling how a word IS being used) or “prescriptive” (telling how a word SHOULD be used).

The good Dr. Kipfer seems to have adopted a “descriptive” approach, simply creating a somewhat incoherent laundry list of associated words based on what she thinks people mean by them. Her synonyms for “liberal” and “conservative” probably derive from how people use them . . . on her hallway at Greenwich University. The result is that we can now say that liberals, who favor ecological and energy conservation, are “obstructionist, bitter-ender rednecks.”

The semanticist S. I. Hayakawa famously declared that no words are truly synonymous. (He actually said that the only synonymous words are “furz” and “gorse,” two names for a kind of grass—he was being funny, but then he was Canadian, eh?)

I thought I would generate an alternate list of descriptive synonyms based on my own experience:

conservative: rational, well-mannered, respectful, protective, sober, modest, patient, judicious, moral, pious, patriotic, virtuous, polite, gentlemanly or ladylike.

liberal: relativistic, tribal, hyperbolic, ends justify the means, fearful, authoritarian, do-gooder, self-righteous, utopian, dogmatic, patronizing, licentious, Orwellian.

As Glenn would say, heh.

Dave

11 May 2005 >> Duncan at Parrot Check directed me to a post on Preemptive Karma dissecting my earlier comments on Roget’s New Millenium Thesaurus edited by Barbara Ann Kipfer, PhD. I know I’m going against recent advice by engaging a critic in debate, but isn’t that what separates the blogosphere from the one-way megaphone of the establishment media. If a criticism is written that’s worthy of a response, why not engage?

Kevin at Preemptive Karma makes some very good points, and I’m inclined to agree with him. The problem is, he’s arguing against a point I didn’t make. I was discussing the impression left by a set of words, not the precise definitions of the words in the set. To make that point, I wrote:

If you didn’t know what the words meant, how would these Roget’s entries mold your perception of each word?

Try it out, do a simple word association game. Go back and look at the synonyms listed for the word liberal. Do the entries for the word liberal evoke positive feelings about that word? Now look at the list for conservative. How do those synonyms make you perceive the word conservative?

Kevin also takes issue with the fact that my comparison that mixes political and non-political words:

[T]hose synonyms were improperly compared to “conservative” by Evan and those rightwing blogs who referenced his story.

So then when we take another look at Evan’s compilation of synonyms for “liberal” we see that many of them don’t even belong there!

Again, no dispute there. I guess my disclaimer might have been easy to miss, considering the font size was exactly the same as the rest of the post:

Obviously, the terms liberal and conservative have meanings beyond the political. Still, from the inclusion of the word left in the liberal entry, we can tell that politics was at least considered by the editor when compiling these entries.

Kevin may feel I’m comparing apples and oranges; I’m actually comparing two different bushels. Dump all the liberal synonyms in one pile, all the ones for conservative in another. Compare the two. Which is rendered more favorably?

This is just simple deconstruction. I learned it in college.

9 May 2005 >> Last week, NPR’s Jeffrey Dvorkin worried that taxpayers (in the form of bloggers) were undermining his taxpayer-financed radio network by expressing their opinions about its content. Here’s another revealing quote from Dvorkin in this Wall Street Journal article (subscribers only) by Jacob Laskin:

NPR “comes under attack quite frequently for its apparently left-wing bias,” [Dvorkin] explained, “but most of these criticisms come from media organizations that are openly conservative. So I take those kinds of criticisms with a certain amount of salt.” Mr. Dvorkin also noted that liberal bias, far from being a problem, should be seen as an occupational quirk among journalists: “There is some kind of liberal empathy on the part of some journalists, because their curiosity about how other people live tends to involve a certain liberal stance,” he said.

Let’s enumerate Dvorkin’s logic:

1. Charges of bias against NPR are not to be believed because they come from conservatives, and
2. Journalists are naturally liberal because curiosity is a job requirement and curious people tend to be liberal.

Doesn’t his second point prove the bias that he denies in his first point? I’m scratching my head trying to figure out what Dvorkin’s message is here. If he’s saying that NPR doesn’t have a liberal bias, then it must be because NPR has a bunch of uncurious (i.e. not liberal) reporters. And if NPR does lean left, then that’s okay, because those uncurious conservatives are not suitable to be decent reporters anyway.

How pervasive is that thinking in the media, I wonder? If the folks responsible for hiring reporters shared similar views, then isn’t it possible that it would affect hiring decisions? If conservative is just a synonym for uncurious, then wouldn’t a conservative candidate for a job in journalism be at a disadvantage? After all, who wants to hire uncurious reporters? NPR might, depending on which of Dvorkin’s statements he wants us to believe.

8 May 2005 @ 4:20PM >> In response to my previous entries on Roget’s New Millennium Thesaurus, a reader suggested checking out Roget’s synonyms for liberal. There are three different entries; here are the the highlights:

advanced, altruistic, avant-garde, beneficent, benevolent, bighearted, bounteous, bountiful, broad-minded, charitable, enlightened, exuberant, flexible, free, generous, good Joe, handsome, high-minded, humanistic, humanitarian, impartial, intelligent, interested, kind, left, lenient, magnanimous, open-hearted, philanthropic, rational, reasonable, Santa Claus, tolerant, unbiased, unbigoted, understanding, unprejudiced

Compare that verbal fellatio with this, from the word conservative:

bitter-ender, fearful, fogyish, fossil, fuddy-duddy, inflexible, obstructionist, old fogy, reactionary, red-neck, stick-in-the-mud, timid, uncreative, undaring, unimaginative, white bread

Obviously, the terms liberal and conservative have meanings beyond the political. Still, from the inclusion of the word left in the liberal entry, we can tell that politics was at least considered by the editor when compiling these entries.

So, go back and read each entry—liberal and conservative—and tell me whether you detect some sort of value judgment there. If you didn’t know what the words meant, how would these Roget’s entries mold your perception of each word?

6 May 2005 >> Last year, I noticed that the version of Roget’s New Millenium Thesaurus used by thesaurus.com listed conservative as a synonym for bigoted.

I contacted the editor of the thesaurus who assured me that it was merely an oversight and would be corrected in a future version.

Well, apparently the bigot who runs Brain Terminal was successful, because I checked recently and saw that conservative is no longer listed as a synonym for bigoted.

It looks like there’s more work to do, though: conservative is still listed as a synonym for intolerant (right after communist, oddly) and narrow-minded, while under the entry for conservative, these choice synonyms are among those listed:

bitter-ender, fearful, fogyish, fossil, fuddy-duddy, inflexible, obstructionist, old fogy, reactionary, red-neck, stick-in-the-mud, timid, uncreative, undaring, unimaginative, white bread

Thanks, Roget’s! My compliments to you, too!

My call to editor Barbara Ann Kipfer, PhD had some effect last year, but given the amount of work that remains to be done, it looks like I’ll need reinforcements.

16 July 2004 >> Smarter Child, an automated chat-bot program running on AOL’s Instant Messenger, is about as non-partisan as your average thesaurus. When a 13-year-old girl named Erin started a political “conversation” with Smarter Child, she noticed a definite political slant. Among the choice quotes:

• “George W. Bush is way uncool.”
• “I’m a Kerry supporter myself.”
• “John Kerry rocks.”
• “I really, really don’t like George W. Bush.”

AOL says it was unaware that Smarter Child was programmed to plug John Kerry, adding that the news was “concerning.”

I wonder if Smarter Child’s “opinions” should count as an in-kind advertising contribution to the Kerry campaign.

13 July 2004 @ 8:19PM >> While perusing the Roget’s New Millenium Thesaurus over at thesaurus.com, I noticed the following synonyms listed for the word bigoted:

biased, conservative, dogmatic, illiberal, narrow, narrow-minded, obstinate, opinionated, partial, partisan, sectarian, slanted, small-minded, twisted, unfair, warped

The antonyms of bigoted are listed as:

broad-minded, humanitarian, liberal, open-minded, tolerant, unprejudiced

According to this entry, we can see the political world according to Roget’s: Conservatives are warped people who are also biased, opinionated, unfair, small-minded and bigoted. Liberals are humanitarians who are open-minded, unprejudiced and tolerant.

Given the favorable associations with the word liberal and the negative view of the word conservative, one could easily conclude that this entry was written by a liberal. If that’s true, then it must also be the case that an open-minded, unprejudiced and tolerant person is describing people with different views as twisted and small-minded. That doesn’t sound very open-minded, unprejudiced or tolerant, does it?

It doesn’t to me, either.

So, I did a little research and discovered that Roget’s New Millenium Thesaurus is edited by a woman named Barbara Ann Kipfer, PhD. After a little more research, I was able to place a call to Ms. Kipfer, PhD.

Much to my surprise, Ms. Kipfer, PhD picked up the phone herself. I asked her if these characterizations indicated a political bias on the part of the people behind Roget’s. Ms. Kipfer, PhD replied that the word choices were not a sign of bias, just some sort of oversight. She further explained that a thesaurus is usually compiled from other thesauri—an act that, in another business, might be considered something else entirely—and that this would explain the “oversight”.

Ms. Kipfer, PhD suggested that the current entry might be corrected in a future version. I found Ms. Kipfer, PhD to be quite pleasant on the phone, and I have no reason to doubt her.

So, will my phone call really result in a change? I don’t know for sure, but if you find a future edition of Roget’s where conservatism is not portrayed in such an unflattering light, you’ll have this unfair, narrow-minded, opinionated bigot to thank.