 First Wednesdays is sponsored by the Vermont Humanities Council and by the Kellogg Hubbard Library, with video production supported by Orca Media. The Hubbard Library is the first First Wednesday lecture of the season. My name is Michelle Singer. I'm the Adult Programs Coordinator here at the library. First Wednesdays is a program with the Vermont Humanities Council that happens on the first Wednesday of the month, October through May, in nine libraries around the state of Vermont. We are pleased to host this series in this region of the state. I'm so glad that you've come out to this talk in months later. Thanks. Nice to see you. So many faces here tonight. Tonight we are rolling out a new way for you to give feedback about First Wednesday's talks. We're asking you to sign in on the iPad or the notebook that are making their way around the room. You just fill out the form and click Submit and then you can hand the iPad or the notebook to your neighbor. And those are here floating around. Some of you have already done that. You can also use your mobile device to sign in. The website is on the top of the screen. And we also have the traditional paper sign in if you prefer to do that. And that's going to make its way around the room as well. If you sign in electronically, you will receive an email from Vermont Humanities tomorrow asking for your feedback. Your input helps us and the Vermont Humanities Council choose topics and speakers for these first Wednesday lectures. You will only receive one email. And signing into the talk tonight will not add your name to any mailing list unless you often ask. So please let me know if you need any help with that sign in. We would like to thank the Vermont Humanities Council sponsors and library sponsors who helped bring this lecture series to the library tonight. Our statewide underwriters are the Institute of Museum and Library Services to the Vermont Department of Libraries. And this popular series is underwritten by the Peter Gilbert Endowment Fund. Tonight's talk is specifically underwritten by Vera Pumpers and we appreciate all that. Thank you to Orca Media and the VAC for taping this program. The video will be available on their website under the first Wednesday series. Information and brochure for the first Wednesday series are on the table in the hallway outside along with community input forms which you're welcome to fill out tonight to take with you and fill out later. At this moment, please make sure your cell phones are silent and note that the restroom is in the back. Without further ado, I am very happy to welcome our speakers tonight. Thank you. Elon Stavins is a Lewis Sebring, professor of humanities, Latin America, the Latino culture at Amherst College, the publisher of restless books and host of NEPR's podcast in contrast. The best-selling author of on-borrow words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days and many other books, his work translated into 20 languages has been adapted into theater, TV, film and radio. Please help me in welcoming Elon Stavins. To be here today together with you, I am particularly excited because it is an ongoing project this one of having first Wednesdays in Vermont and some of us getting invited to it. I am in awe and salute the state for this idea of having the public library opened up to topics in every first day of every first Wednesday of the month. I wish it was done in other parts of the country as well. At a time when reading and culture in general are a deceit in a state of attack, I feel that this idea of gathering the civic and civil engagement with a variety of topics is certainly very important for those of us who are on this side of the podium and that have the microphones. There's one place here if anybody is looking for an extra chair. I will begin by telling you that I had to make a confession that I have a passion. Maybe you can call it an obsession and that is that I can't live without dictionaries. I have a collection in my personal library of a wide array of dictionaries many of which are absolutely obsolete and useless and a few of them are contemporary, present, very engaging and those are the ones that I open most frequently. I am a devoted reader of dictionaries and I am also a critic of them and have been on the side of making them. I want to talk to you today about all those relationships that I have with the dictionaries and what is it that we do with dictionaries, what do they do to us, how do they came to be, the varieties of dictionaries that exist across cultures, particularly across cultures. I am very interested in the differences between English-language dictionaries and French-language dictionaries or Spanish or German or Hebrew or Arabic. And many of the also-leaved dictionaries that I have in my house have to do with the fact that, well, I don't know many of those languages, still I have the dictionaries with me. I also have entire collections of Don Quixote. Another passion of mine in languages, Sanskrit, Korean, that I don't understand, but I am sure the book is as good as it is in Spanish and likewise with 100 years of solitude. I have become this fan of the book and have collected as many possible versions, sometimes two translations within the same language as possible. One thing I don't have is translated dictionaries because dictionaries don't get translated. Dictionaries are only emerging and emerging in their own language and for that reason they are also stuck in them. Let me tell you how my passion began. It began with my father as many things do in my life. When I was a young man and you might relate to this type of scene or anecdote, I would be at the lunch or dinner table talking about whatever was happening in the world or whatever was happening in my world, when I would say something that my father would suddenly hear and say, stop, you use that word improperly or incorrectly, and I would say, how do you know? And he would say, I know because I am a friend of dictionaries and one day you might become one yourself. Go and look up that word and you will find out if you have the right definition and if so, the right usage of it. There was nothing more annoying than my father telling me that there was this sacred text that had the truth and nothing but the truth as if it had a right from Mount Sinai, that whatever the dictionary would say was correct and without reasonable doubt. And thus, impatiently I would go and open up the dictionary, making sure at least inside my heart and my mind that my father would be wrong this time, that I would be able to find a definition if not in the first instance, in the second or in the third or in the fourth that would be able to serve me as proof that he did not know the language he thought of complete and that I would be able to debate it or prove him wrong. But yet again, he was 30 or 40 years older than me, I would go to the dictionary and find out that he was right and also find out other things because I would stop in that second definition or the third definition or the fifth and realize that words keep on changing, that words are never settled, that language by definition is in constant change. In fact, the most constant aspect of language is that it is always changing and that transformation is what keeps the dictionaries alive and us going to them all the time. I was born and raised in Mexico and my first language was in Spanish. My first language was Yiddish. In talking to my father, at times the conversation would be in Yiddish and he would send me to a Yiddish language dictionary and at times the conversation with him or with some classmates or with my siblings would be in Spanish and I would go and find out whatever the Royal Academy of the Spanish language, the official dictionary of the language into which I was born would say about this word or that word. The fact that that dictionary had been printed in Madrid and not in Mexico City and the fact also that among the very first typos or mistakes that the Royal Academy had made in referring to Mexicans was that we were not Mexicanos. The way it is usually referred to in Mexico were Mexicans but Mexicans as if they didn't know that all of us did not use that word was proved to me that whoever was behind those dictionaries could be wrong, that they were not prophets, that they were not really connected with the divine, that there were always human aspects to the language. Eventually I realized that what my father was telling me was not only to look up this word or that word in this language or that language but to realize that the dictionary is a great companion, a great friend, that it is really next to you throughout your life, either you battle against it or you embrace it as such. And that sooner or later you realize that it is an incredibly vast reservoir of words that you might know but you might also not know and they are available to you right there. Dictionaries can be very small or can be very large like the dictionaries that I would look up at that time or many of the dictionaries that I have in my personal library tend to be this mammoth-like door-stopping volume that contain the entire language or at least they suggest or they propose that to us. They contain the entire language and they make it available for whatever moment we might be able to need it. But stop for a second and savor this thought which to me is one of the most exciting dictionaries. All the words we use at any time of the day, young and old when we relate to somebody in a very formal way and when we relate to somebody in an informal way words that sometimes surprise us and words that we think we know very well all of them are contained between these two covers as if the language could be handled, could be restrained as if the language was really capable of fitting into a book. Of course we know that language always jumps out of the dictionary and the sooner we hear a new word we realize that it might not be yet in the dictionary that the dawns or the erudites that are putting the dictionaries together might still be debating it or might be analyzing it and that sooner or later that word might enter or might not. And so there are two types of dictionaries and I'm going to talk about a number of different types. I would say the dictionaries that dream of including everything in I would call them very pretentious a arrogant and the dictionaries that realize that they are limited that there is a lot of language that is outside and that eventually that language is going to be brought in those are more humane, more humble, more modest dictionaries that realize that the change of language is the change of their edition and that whatever new edition is going to be brought up or brought out is an edition that will need to reflect the current generation in the way it speaks or it doesn't speak for it is well known that those that are more liberal and more daring in the use of language tend to be younger that those that are young are ready to invent new words that are ready to challenge the syntactical and morphographic patterns that we have of the language and that most of that creativity that eventually makes it to the dictionary comes from youth or comes from those that are not at the center of our society but can be immigrants or can be newcomers or can be tourists that will see things anew, things for the very first time and that will feel that the language can be more elastic can be more creative those of us who are of a certain age tend to be more conservative we believe that the language needs to be protected that the language needs to be passed on to the next generation and in many ways the creation of dictionaries is a desire to pass on what the previous generation knows so that the patterns that have been used for some time can be prolonged, can be projected into the future and whatever the future does with them, it's up in the air but there are over two types of dictionaries and this distinction is one that the lexicographers use more often there are prescriptive dictionaries and there are descriptive dictionaries the prescriptive dictionaries are the dictionaries that use the language inside to tell people how to speak, how to write, how to engage with the language in contrast the descriptive dictionaries again more humble, maybe more humane are the ones that realize that you can't teach people through a dictionary but instead the dictionary is a reflection of how people speak and what you do as a lexicographer or as a dictionary maker is nothing but reflect that change let me give you an example the dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language is a prescriptive dictionary it wants to establish the way the language should be spoken the animosity that I felt as a young man through Spain through the fact that the book was published in Madrid had much to do with the fact that many of us in Latin America 450 million people react to the fact that 35 to 40 million people who are in Spain feel that they have the rights and the property of the Spanish language and that the rest of us should use it in the way they want even with an accent sometimes incomprehensible but the fact is that in my doing so the Royal Academy has been very clear in saying that there are words that they will not include because these are words that should not be used in the Spanish language meaning only the words that they believe that should be used will be included in a prescription of how the language will be used I know that this sounds a bit dictatorial authoritarian but not all cultures have this vision of a democratic language that English has many dictionaries dictionaries in Arabic, dictionaries in Swahili dictionaries in Spanish often have that prescriptive approach of using the dictionary to establish the way the language ought to be used this means of course that there are going to be many occasions in which somebody like me would find as a young man or today would find something in the dictionary that is not there meaning I will not find it there in that sense, since I was very young I realized that the prescriptive dictionaries are really two parallel ones the dictionary that has everything that was included in that the academies accepted to insert in them and in all the words that were left out I would say that that is an imaginary dictionary the dictionary of what was left for the rest of us to savor and to use now the prescriptive dictionaries are much more dynamic are much more engaging it's not surprising that English is first and foremost a language that embraces the scriptive dictionaries the OED, the Merriam Webster are all dictionaries that are all the time including new words as soon as they hear them as soon as they see them cubulating in different places they will consider them and eventually they will nominate them to be integrated there's an entire process about those words getting and at the end of the year there's always a statement that the Merriam Webster dictionary has accepted this year between 10 and 100 words and these are the words and this is a result of the impetus that comes from the readers, the users the entire population of how we use the words and how we feel that the words should be integrated into those pictures thus the descriptive dictionaries are mirrors or reflections or statements or testimonies of how we're using the language in the current time if an extra terrestrial would suddenly arrive on earth and open up magically the latest edition either online or in print of the Merriam Webster won't be the way Americans are using the language in that particular moment and maybe that would be a tool for dialogue with ETs or a science fiction like maneuver a mechanism for them to control us to pull us down and at the same time not all descriptive dictionaries have been as benign and as democratic as I am describing for a long time the OED refused to include the word F-U-K-C it is that word has never made it it has a C-K and that is because they in Oxford believed that with the right spelling the word should not be included in there because it was nasty it was a sign of low class a way of communication and it wasn't until 1974 where after much debate that word finally made it into the dictionary when a word makes it to a dictionary in many ways it is a cultural statement I think that 1974 more or less it announces that after the 60s about the upheaval of a new generation the dictionaries needed to be much more flexible much more open and let's confess it, let's be honest it's hard to think of a more nervous and active and elastic word as F-U-C-K you can use it to express admiration and annoyance you can use it as an adjective and as a noun and as an adverb it is incredible it can mean something sometimes it doesn't mean anything and it's not to include that word it would be practically not to include 1% of all the words that are very important that the word is there as my father would often say if you go to the dictionary you will also find words that you probably are curious about that it would be good for you to look at that have to do with sexual parts are you interested in sexual parts? I was 16 or 17 or about women and you know many of us do the most nerdy do go to the dictionaries when our bodies and our minds are just discovering the word it would look at whatever part of the body in order to be amazed that yes it is the stride and that it's not a figment of our imagination the most delicious aspects of dictionaries are the challenges that those that make dictionaries in putting together a definition now think of this whoever thought of this idea of compiling a volume of the entire language that we use was either genius or absolutely mad we have an enormous array of possibilities in words in those words by putting them in a volume that are establishing that they are our heritage but how do we establish that heritage think for example of the word yellow how on earth would you define the word yellow one thing that you could do is you can say it is not green or it is a combination of this and that but yellow is yellow and very often if there is poetry in a dictionary and I think dictionaries are full of poetry it is in the concise abbreviated way that a word that defies definition is presented to us the word air yellow the word love how do you define the word love in one sentence because the challenge of a dictionary maker is that the word will appear at the very beginning followed with a letter that will say this is a verb or this is a noun or this is an adjective and then a sentence that usually does not run more than two lines that will state what that word means in clear, concise direct language that will never use the word you can't say yellow is yellow it can never use the word that is being defined and it can never use a word in the definition that is harder than the word that is being defined in other words dictionaries are meant for people to be understood they don't want to simply show off although to me a dictionary is always a form of showing up but it has to be accessible and it has to be readily understood by others and in that I am always astonished by the creativity that these dictionary makers have in coming up with definitions of something that we find absolutely mundane like yellow or like air or like love but let me stop in the word love about maybe 15 years ago I did an experiment with my Amherst College students I happened to be very lucky in having multi-lingual dictionaries and in having multi-lingual students meaning students that come from the francophone world and from the Hispanic world and from the Arabic world and so what I asked them once as an assignment is to go and look up the word love in their own language in Russian in German in French in Italian in English in Spanish in Hebrew in Chinese and of course the first reaction that one has is that the word should be defined exactly in the same way everybody understands the word yellow in the same way if somebody in Moscow or in Bogota or in Cairo the word yellow is the word yellow because we see the color yellow we register and now we're going to define it in a particular way but what do you do with human emotions human emotions that are defined by the culture in which they are experienced now all of us in one way or another know what love is but think do we really know what love is we can use the word love to describe love of oneself self love love of God love of nature love of the world and love of country we can talk about romantic love we can talk of love of parents and siblings and family in general and we can talk of love when connected with friendship and love of one's passion my love for dictionaries do I use the word love in the same way when I tell my wife I love you and when I say to a student this is a wonderful paper I love it is the word love really meant in the same way when a young person first discovers love and uses that word for the first time or when somebody 58 tells his wife I love you we've been married 32 years and it is as if it was the first is the word different has the word changed so my students went out on this quest and came back and what we are in them together found out was really wonderful the fact that we had to look for the official dictionary of their own language meaning the Royal Academy of the Spanish language dictionary or the La Ruse dictionary in French or the OED by official I was already entering into this quackmire of who is who represents the language who is the authority in the language in what way is the OED that we trust more than somebody just coming up with a dictionary in a small publishing house in Brooklyn or in Dallas that tells the rest of the population this is the way you should use the language so in asking them to go to the official site I was hoping that we would get a statement of what that culture sees as love and what we found out together with them was astonishing because in many ways also expected almost stereotypical the French in the La Ruse dictionary the first definition is one that stresses romantic love it is about encountering somebody else that you will you will almost be paralyzed very French the Germans at the very beginning used the word love to define love of one's country and it felt in the way they delivered that there was something almost a deterrent almost as if you don't choose that love but that love chooses you there were others that emphasized at the very beginning because there were various definitions 2, 3, 4 love of friendship like the Italians or other languages that simply talked of love in a vague and open way like a connection with things that you empathize with or that change you and transform you inside so my quest together with them was to try to understand by making choices the culture stresses a particular type of approach to the emotion that the language concise as it is in the very first definition in the dictionary is validating more than others as if the stereotype that we have as French as falling in love romantically comes already in the La Rose dictionary in the way that the view that we have of Germans being exact and devoted to one's nation or to one's country shows up as well and so I wonder if in the realm of emotions we are dealing with a tense at the finding anger or envy do you distinguish the words envy and jealousy in a dictionary do we see them not only by what they mean in terms of the language or do we see them through the prism and the lens of the culture that we ourselves are projecting and are projected into in that sense you will not be surprised by the fact that we do a history of certain types archetypes, prototypes and stereotypes of a society by reading dictionaries across time go and open up the word woman in the OED the very first definition shows up around 1870 and it is as a companion to man we couldn't put in the age of the metron movement we couldn't put such a definition and the same thing goes for a pet or goes for the centrality of the male character in many of those dictionaries in the middle of the 19th century is a question and as a result most of the things that are defined are defined in relationship or in perspective to the male and as the world has become more pluralistic more open more equal hopefully you see that the definitions move in a variety of ways reflecting the changes of our time I am not only Mexican but I am also I grew up in a small minority in Mexico, a Jewish minority and so the word Jew has always been one that I look for in dictionaries to see how they have described it it is another word that has always surprised me at the very beginning for instance in the history of the Spanish language the very first dictionary that we have coincides more or less with the writing of the second volume of Don Quixote in 1614 the first dictionary of the Spanish language is published in 1615 the second part of Don Quixote I am telling you this because this is Cervantes is known as the depository of our language and so the fact that the very first dictionary was published at the same time is a statement of the language that he is using and of how the inquisition for the very first dictionary was published under the ages of the inquisition allowed or didn't allow certain words to be included Cervantes is incredibly open about the words he includes and just like Shakespeare it invents all sorts of words because writers have the right to invent as many words as they want and eventually those words to the dictionary because Shakespeare invented about 2,000 lawyers being one of them that eventually makes it to the OED the same thing more or less would Cervantes but the very first time that a dictionary in Spanish in 1614 uses the word Jew is to describe somebody who engages in satanic endeavors and is attempting to be one ready to lead Christians in the wrong path fortunately that is no longer the definition that exists of a Jew in the current dictionary but it has been a very slow process to say the least if you go from 1614 to the current definition there is almost I feel a reluctance of making the Jewish religion autonomous and legitimate and authentic and instead it is always the counterpart of Christianity and the one that stole or didn't steal what Christians and what Jesus did or didn't do the history of mistakes in dictionaries which is I mean just as one is in awe by the words and how they are described one is also astonished by how certain words have been defined over time in Portuguese the almost until very recently the definition for day for the day was the time that it takes the sun to circle the earth it wasn't until a number of Portuguese writers wrote to the dictionary makers that they finally changed the definition to the time that apparently takes the sun to circle the earth as if Galileo had not crossed and we were still earth centric for a long time in the dictionary of the Spanish language the definition of dog was a canine that raises one back foot in order to pee and I think it was only in 1983 after Garcia Marcus wrote to the Royal Academy saying that this was an embarrassment that they changed it and brought in an entirely different definition one of the the challenges that we face today is that dictionaries are still central to our culture but undergoing a rapid change most of us no longer go to a physical book open it up and see what it says or it doesn't say instead we go online and we look at OED or at Merriam-West Webster type the word and come up with a definition it's incredibly fast speedy efficient practical but there is something that is missing there and I might sound as a nostalgia here but the fact that sometimes in the middle of the night suffering of insomnia I don't have anything to do and I'm not ready to turn around once more in my bed I go and open a dictionary and a word and a definition allow me to jump to another word into another definition back to the early part of the volume to the middle it is very much like the pleasure we still have in having libraries that is we don't have books that are delivered to us on a Kindle or on an iPad but we can go to a library and browse around and see all the books that are next to the book that we were looking for and by chance we will stumble upon one that actually is the one that was waiting for us the book that was waiting for us that will change our life that we didn't know was there as a friend waiting and that is what happens with dictionaries that are imprinted for them there are words that are waiting for us that we didn't know we don't know we won't know until we open the dictionary and browse haphazardly accidentally in a jazzy way and stumble upon a word that we might or might not use but is all of a sudden a capsule telling us what the entire world looks like through that unique word a word that is it's unique and it's for us the OED in its second edition has 100 around 175 thousand entries it has 20 volumes and those entries are of a historical nature because there are different types of dictionaries again the dictionaries that are ready to offer one definition and one alone as a statement of what the current language is and the dictionary is like the OED that want us to go back in time and see how the word has been used and often give us a quote from Milton or Shakespeare or T.S. Eliot to understand the context to understand how that word is framed and phrased historical dictionaries are dictionaries not only for the common use but they also tell us that before us somebody has used the word yellow and that that word might actually have been used in a different way and here are two or three examples of how it has been used in 1895 in 1910 and in 1955 and by offering us that many of possibilities that bouquet feel that the language our language is really not ours that we are but part of a chain of users many have used it before many will use it after us and we are its keepers its protectors its destroyers we are the ones that have the language for now at one point somebody else will come along and carry the torch just as we are carrying the torch from somebody who came before us and that pushes you to understand the language in a different perspective it is not only a way to communicate between us, it is also a way to communicate with the dead that is what really the classic is you open Milton's Paradise Laws and you are engaging with a writer that has been dead for 400 years 300 years and likewise when you open a dictionary you realize that some of these words are not going to be there in the next edition because they will not be used in the same way and probably they will not be used all together upon arriving as a Mexican immigrant, a bad hombre to the United States in 1985 I thought I knew what the word badge B-A-D was and I was happy about it I was slowly making English my own language I did it by at night opening Moby Dick a book that I had read in Spanish and having a dictionary next to me and I would read the very first line or the very first paragraph call me Ishmael and I whatever word I would not know I would look up in the dictionary and make a little note to myself and being a book of the 19th century being this magisterial epic novel of the 19th century there were many words that I didn't know and so I would accumulate notes in a hefty manner until I would realize that I was almost competing with a size and scope of Moby Dick and that actually the object and subject of my attention was not Melville as such but was the OED that was telling me so much of what I needed to know to understand this classic novel I would turn off the light and then I would try to remember all the words that I had just looked up and all the definitions that I had written to memorize them and as if to have them in my reservoir in my database that word wasn't used at that time in order to be able to use it and be a show off I was an immigrant I wanted to use the language the way a native would use it and the best way was to use my memory and use every intellectual equipment that I had in order to make that language my own I soon realized that there are two creative forms the creative form of the fiction writer that uses the language in a straightforward way to describe a world that he's or her imagination are presenting in a kind of journalistic way describing it as if it was existing before his or her eyes and then there was the other creativity the creativity of the dictionary that was allowing me to understand everything that was in this first book and I have and I came to the conclusion then a conclusion that I cherish to this day I believe that every novel yesterdays, todays and tomorrows is already contained in the OED the OED has to be scrambled, rearranged throw all the words into the air and if you are T.S. Eliot or Maya Angelou catch the ones that you're going to use in your poem or in your play and then you're going to turn that dictionary into your own language into your own statement into your own vision but it is already there David Foster Wallace a genius is going to come across in this year or in ten years she is going to use already the words that are contained in that dictionary she is going to rearrange them in a way that none of us here know exactly how and yet when that arrangement is made we are going to be amazed we are going to realize that the words can have yet another way of coming together that we didn't know in existence and that is the beauty of the language and the beauty of the dictionary as a seed, as a container of things that are present but things that are past and things that are future as well I told you at the very beginning that I am not only a reader in a user of dictionaries but I am also a maker of dictionaries and so all this critique that I have given you of the lexicographers as pretentious it applies to me as well I have worked for some time with a colleague at Merriam Webster and suggested certain words and they looked at the way they use the words that come from the outside they debate them and eventually they accept them or they don't accept them it is a wonderful process and I have done for better or worse a dictionary of something called Spanglish Spanglish is the mix of Spanish and English it is a hybrid language it uses a little of the Spanish and a little bit of English to create something that is in between Kenies from here there are close to 60 million Latinos in the United States and just like any previous immigrant group they use the language in the best way they can sometimes without the education that they wish they had because they have to bake meat and provide for their children and the result is like English the mix of Yiddish and English that happened in the second generation the children of the immigrant of the Jewish immigrants or Chinglish the mix of Chinese or Mandarin with English or Franglais the mix of French and English Spanglish is an incredibly dynamic form that is taking place right now in cities like Miami and New York and Los Angeles and Chicago and I faced the challenge of making the very first dictionary of the Spanglish language and I felt like a thief and I think every dictionary maker is a thief we are thieves because we steal from people the language that is used on the street we codify it we catalog it we present it to others as authoritative this is the way I have heard the word from Spanglish say clica or beautiful used three times what are the laws of dictionaries is that if you are going to insert the word you have to have heard the word in three different places that are not connected with one another that users are not connected with one another with the same meaning resulting of them in other words you can't invent the word all of a sudden and say that and so we I together with a group of researchers went all across the country to harvest the Spanglish terms that are being used all over quickly realizing that there is a Cuban way of using this new language in a Mexican way and then an Anglo way of when we are learners of the language in that we needed to figure out spelling Spanglish isn't the process of navigating between an oral form of communication to a written form and a dictionary allows the language to feel that it has arrived that it is settled that it has led it is grounded in doing that dictionary when we published it many colleagues thought that we had done a disservice to Hispanic culture by giving legitimacy to this hybrid that is emerging in front of our eyes and of our ears others like me felt and feel that those hybrids are what make language interesting and that constant transformation often results in a language that is altogether new Latinos in the United States don't speak Spanish and many of us don't speak exclusively English we can speak a middle language a middle ground the way middle languages were spoken with different invasions by the Romans or by the French or by the Americans in different moments in history and people needed to react to those influences colonial or imperial presences by adapting one of the most confronting and defiant critiques that we faced and I come here to the end of my talk is it came from the purists and they called themselves purists they said that language needs to be pure in order to survive and I perfectly understand this worldview of course in the age of Trump the word pure is very uncomfortable because it has supremacy components or connotations but there is a feeling and a sense that language needs to be protected in dictionaries are authorities the way academies are authorities I would go to my father and my father would say this is the way the language is used he was an authority he was telling me that there is a right way of using the language and there is a wrong way of using the language and so I thank the purists for pushing us to protect the language I also believe that impurity in language in particular is important and so I return to the word bad and to Michael Jackson I don't know if I have to say more but having understood what the word bad was about when I first arrived to this country and the way Melville would use it I quickly heard the way everybody did the use that Michael Jackson was doing of bad which really meant good and so my bad or this is bad can be this is good and that means that a word will fluctuate and be transformed the word gay the word queer words that in Shakespeare's time could mean happy or bizarre today might have a completely different connotation it's not that Shakespeare is old fashioned Shakespeare belongs to his time and we belong to ours in the future the word gay or queer or bad might be understood totally different the way I'll war when accepting the nomination to be vice president used the term information superhighway to refer to the web the word web wasn't yet in vogue at the time and today when I say to my students alright you can use the information superhighway they have no idea how war is still alive I think and so am I I think too the words change and we change them and they receive them and they change them as well and so bad is good and words need to be protected but also we need to recognize that the words change and we change with them that we are the change that the words are cost upon and that the words are not ours but we are transient entities English language was before us and English language will be after us we are simple and passing users of it dictionaries as authoritative and authoritarian as they might be are our helpers our providers the reciprocals of what the language is but we can't be paralyzed by them they are also open to change open to critique they are ours they don't come from outside and eventually somebody who is a student today just arriving to the college will become the next lexicographer and will say that the way Professor Statham was using a word what's not the wrong needs to be updated in the right way and happily so thank you nations complains 20 million people in this country there are Latinos no I mentioned 60 million so please do something in that dictionary the latino is degrading to bundle up the people the latino voters it's just the obsessive I don't understand what you're saying can you develop it or not what comes to people Latin America at the beginning of it because the colonization this tragedy they become latinos I remember that thing I don't understand what you're saying because the people in Mexico they are they are not latinos they are Mexican Spanish descendants they are mixed with the indigenous population I don't understand what you're saying I don't understand what you're saying I don't understand what you're saying I appreciate your comment the term Latino is one that the Hispanic population has chosen for itself it uses an X these days it has gone through a variety of terms Hispanic Spanish speaking the Mexicans the Cubans and the Puerto Ricans within that community the rubrics that we use to define our communities can be very problematic the term African American Black Negro in a certain time so those terms are in themselves not stable but in constant change Latino is a term that I use for myself and that is current today just as Hispanic was used 20 years before though I would prefer other terms there is a kind of resignation when the majority uses a term for language is the rule of the majority and if everybody I found that would establish if I might not like the fact that instead of techo or roof or ceiling the word rueful and I might teach my students to say roof or ceiling or techo but if 60 million people are using rueful I might make a tantrum and I might say I don't want this word in my dictionary but then I'm going to turn it into a prescriptive dictionary not a descriptive dictionary so the language is for the people, by the people to the people and for better if there was a question here and then I go here go ahead so you mentioned Cervantes and the the development of the standard Spanish definitions are there Americans which have had an oversized influence individual American writers whose speakers have an oversized influence on redefinition of words sure are they English language in the United States there is a fascinating relationship between literature and language there are writers that use a word for the first time and then that word eventually is used by others or accepted in dictionaries TS Eliot used words that eventually made it to the OED Shakespeare is the best example 2000 words he invented that eventually made it so writers, yes there are many American writers that have used different terms who is it Twain is a perfect example of the usage and a very controversial example of the usage of terms in Huckleberry Thin he uses the language that the child will have and the language that the slave will have he is not black we can debate issues of appropriation he is taking certain words using them and some of those words will eventually be used because they are being used in the text by readers making them to the dictionary I think that the consequence or the corollary of what you are saying is the tension that exists between the oral way we use the language and the written way we use the language we can use words in whatever way we want but there is a kind of tyranny of the printed word once a word is printed that word has grounded and it becomes it becomes a statement of its time and it is raped by whoever it is raped and it is accepted the same thing happens with for a long time up until the middle ages contracts were a handshake today we need a contract that is in written form the written way of using the language will establish that whatever agreement the same thing goes with the usage of the words in the contract or in that novel so yes David Foster Wallace is another wonderful example he was an erudite of the language in infinite jest he pushes the language over the edge he sometimes engaged in debates with his copy editors who would tell him there is no such word in English and he would say I don't care I want to keep that word in my novel who are you to tell me the tension with copy editors that we all face the copy editor version of my book came in I hide my head under the ground for two days and then come out yeah it's there are many American writers who have established worth Magia Angelou in Beloved there are plenty it particularly happens in general ethnic writers often feel that the language doesn't belong to them until and unless they make it their own they adapt it to themselves and ethnic writers can be at the forefront of making the language much more elastic including a number of words that we were not accepted so going back to Jewish in Yiddish in words like Shmok, Shmendrik, Bagel Popik, Chutzpah these words were not in the language until the Jewish immigration came in and until writers like Anzia Yerserska Ibrahim Kahan, Izi Pashemi Zinger established them through the New Yorker and others as words that are legitimate today those words coming from Yiddish or Hebrew are part of the English language and you don't have to italicize them nobody italicizes the word Mesusa anymore it's part of the English language but it wasn't part of the English language 200 years ago and the word sombrero or the word taco the same thing those many words that have to do with food that have to do with emotions and with sexual parts those words come from other languages unfortunately this is a good moment to not all languages have the same amount of words English is incredibly lucky in being I want to say something that has controversial elements here English is an imperial language a colonial language a language that goes beyond its constraints and inflicts itself on others but it's a very elastic language and so it includes words of those encounters words that it harvests in Vietnam in Cambodia in Latin America in Russia it's open to including all those words much more than French the French are always saying we don't want more English the Americans are saying we're speaking whatever we are and we'll see what happens the fact that we use the word table for a table it's so arbitrary why don't we call the table child to read that that word table is going to be connected with that object but there is this fluidity when you travel across languages when you travel in the world but when you are multi-lingual you realize that it could be messa or it could be tabla or it could be a variety of things the words and the objects are really divorced and it's the culture that connects them and I love those aspects as well now dictionaries force upon us those words in a much more direct fashion but languages I love this section in chapter 2 of the bible where where there is this Adam and Eve this naming of objects and by naming the objects the objects become your property of course in today's world there is this sense of appropriation and that everything is human-centric there's a beautiful passage in 100 years of solitude a book I highly recommend where there is an epidemic of insomnia and everybody forgets because they haven't slept for so long how to refer to things these objects they don't remember that is a chair and so one of the Aurelianos suggests that they should put a little sign as in Montessori that would be a chair so every object the cow the egg the chair the mother but then they forget what those objects are for and they have to add which is used for people to sit down which is used for breakfast and of course by doing that they are already creating language they are establishing what a dictionary does the definition or the description of what the world is all about what do we use the cow for what do we use the chair for always from the perspective of the user of the language yes I'm interested in your Spanglish dictionary in what language are the definitions written good I'm going to answer that question but I'm going to take a little detour there are monolingual dictionaries and I should say that there is a contradiction at the heart of the American experience we are the most powerful country in the world the most the one that is most shaped by immigrants meaning every single language from every single part of the world is spoken on American territory today and yet we have phobias for foreign languages we believe everybody should speak English because Jesus is spoken and so and so and so and so we the most current and the most sellable dictionaries are monolingual dictionaries the OED it might be kind of stating the obvious but the OED is a monolingual dictionary it's a dictionary that gives the word in English and gives the definition in English there are bilingual dictionaries and students in particular tourists use them all the time English the word is in English and Spanish because it's sold in Spain or depending on where you're using it and so it will be how you use the language in Spanish and in English and sometimes it will be two books in one and in opening in the reverse and you will see Spanish in English and Swahili and Swahili in English and the definition will be in one language and then it will be the definition in the other language there are fascinating monolingual dictionaries and multi-lingual dictionaries I have some that can be a word in one language and then the definition in English in French in Portuguese in Hebrew etc whatever and that's extraordinary unto itself the dictionary assumes that the world is not the way Jesus spoke it there's a plurality of language this dictionary has two editions now so we have the dictionary that lists the word in Spanglish and gives the English language definition and now there's an edition of the word in Spanglish and a Spanish language definition both of them are bilingual dictionaries but there's not a monolingual dictionary yet of Spanglish with the Spanglish definition no I might be dead before that I think we have time for one more question yes you talked about your collection of dictionaries and you have a Swapili one useless probably for me but do you have any other than two language dictionaries because I didn't know there was too many dictionaries of African languages I have about seven or eight dictionaries of African languages I have a lot of dictionaries of African slang I particularly like slang American slang African slang Spanish slang and I have a number of them published in England in India and in Africa in different places I have dictionaries also that are like dictionaries that are sexual parts that are used throughout the Spanish-speaking world because we in the same language as a George Bernard shop would say we're separated by the same language Kujia Kujia and so we have the way the word will be used in Mexico is different to the word that will be used in Chile or in Paraguay and they will use many other words so this lists a word it goes by country and it tells you all the words that are used for the male part or whatever I have dictionaries of cowboy English medical English advertising my wife is ready to kill me thank you very much