Usage examples you wouldn't expect to find in a dictionary

[pauamma]

Comments

[lesket]

Ha, I just had a class on sexism, racism and homophobia in dictionaries/lexicography the other day, so here one of the entries (from SSKJ, a Slovene dictionary) mentioned:
under "beat, v" there's "He'll beat her until she's bruised all over."
It's also really interesting to look into which dictionary entries use he/a man/etc. in the examples and which use she/a woman/etc.
Here's some examples (translated from the aforementioned dictionary) in which "he" is the subject: he: made, did, learnt, learnt his lesson, grown into a man, pulled himself together and started studying, was angered etc.
On the other hand, she: choked back tears, is pretty, has wide hips, became a prostitute at an early age, behaves provocatively etc.

I guess this just goes to show that dictionaries are not always as objective as we'd expect them to be.

[biascut]

My dad once came home with a fifty-year old dictionary from a secondhand shop, on the grounds that the English language doesn't change that much and it was probably better back then anyway. I turned to the entry for "Negro" and read it out, and it was SO racist that I can still remember it now and my dad thought I was making it up.

I was only about twelve or thirteen or something, I think. I was quite a canny child!

[nyxelestia]

I'm curious, but what did the entry say?

[biascut]

Something like, "A member of the dark-skinned, thick-lipped, flat-nosed, woolly-haired races of Africa".

Which, obviously, is not only WORLD of offensive, but also not particularly physiologically accurate - even if you substituted less offensive terms, the characteristics they are describing certainly don't apply to everyone on the African continent! So yes, dictionaries in "not so much ideologically neutral."

[tsukikage85]

I can't really think of a non-awkward example sentence for suffocate used transitively.

[pauamma]

That may not apply to the equivalent in the source language, but according to MW, suffocate (transitively) has the primary meaning: a (1) : to stop the respiration of (as by strangling or asphyxiation) (2) : to deprive of oxygen
So it could conceivably be used as in "suffocate a fire".

[mapmakerscolors]

Conceivably, sure, but probably much less likely to occur "in the wild" and therefore not as useful in the dictionary, I'd wager.

[pauamma]

I haven't looked at the examples in the other direction (it's a bilingual dictionary). I will wnen I can lay hands on itg again.

[emperor_spock]

OK, I agree on the unnecessarily violent turn the 'river' example takes (as if river's primary function is to be thrown newborns into), but what's wrong with the other sentence? Suffocation is an ugly thing for anyone who breathes to sustain life. Or are children somehow special (which they are not) not to be mentioned, to be excluded from the list of possible suffocation victims (which they are)?

Or should it be sugarcoated to the desirable level of shiny and cute? 'Oh my, we used to spend whole sunny weekends singing and dancing and suffocating till we dropped'

[pony_rocks]

XD Yeah. I agree.

[mmm_words]

So you have to have an example for suffocate. It's morbid to use children, but why not? My general discomfort stems from the imperative nature of the sentence. I hadn't expected "suffocate" as a command.
Also, "suffocating till we dropped" made me lol.

[pauamma]

If I had stumbled across an entry mentioning deliberate killing of adults, I would have mentioned it as well(or instead). The bias, if there is one, is either in the dictionary or in your own mind.

[ember_cyprus]

When I studied German in the university, we had a book of grammar exercises, and the sentences (to put the correct form of a word) were all really weird like "Children were jumping from the windows of a burniong house". The name of the book's author (which I unfortunately forgot) became an inside joke for us, kind of a synonym for 'weirdo'

[pikku_gen]

My Finnish-Spanish-Finnish dictionary has such weird examples that I once planned to make a (Kafka-style) story off them. Unfortunately they're not so cohesive as to make a story all by themselves, so now I'm thinking... a cartoon? XD (They'd make such a nice family saga/student life crossover.)

[muckefuck]

In the same vein, the one line I can remember from an old German phrasebook I found twenty years ago is, "Entschuldigen Sie, das ist nicht mein Handtuch!"

[ubykhlives]

See, this can be an unavoidable problem for some lexicographers. In my dictionary of Ubykh, for instance, because I can't get new specimen forms from native speakers, I have to rely on whatever exists in the corpus, and sometimes they're a little unfortunate:

wɜɬɜ́nɜ w(ɨ)ʁʷɜ́ ʧ’ɜbzɜwnɨ wɐ́lɜlɜw ‘they will drown you in spittle"
ʁɜzɜfɜʨ’ɜgʲɨ ʁʷɜ wɨbɨwɐkʲ’ɜʃʷɜn ʧ’ɜwdɨsɜwt "you will stick one end of it up your arse"
wɨskʷ’ɜwmɜ tɨtɨn mɨbjɜɕɜ zɜq’ɐlɜ wɨzdɐq’ɐjbɜ ʨɜl "it is better if I kill you and hide you[r body] where no-one will see it"

and one of the most unfortunate of all, the only known example of the verb gʷɜgʷɜ "to take in handfuls" is the malediction ɕʷɨ́ʨxɨnɜ dɨgʷɜgʷɐ́χ "may they take your shit in handfuls".

[pne]

Makes you wonder how certain we can be of the exact meaning of that last verb.

[ubykhlives]

True. Though fortunately this is one of the roots for which a Turkish translation was acquired directly from Tevfik Esenç, the last speaker of Ubykh; in this context it's more or less equivalent to the Turkish verb avuçlamak.

[pauamma]

Granted, but not applicable to the dictionary I saw this in, since the source language is alive and thriving. (And likewise for similar examples listed in comments.)