The Cynic Express(ed) 3.09: Get Outta My Language, Unca Bill!

     Call me Winston. I read in the New York Times today that Microsoft has christened its own Encarta Dictionary of the whole wide English-speaking world. Great. Microsoft, that great Oceania of the Northwest, has decided that rather haphazardly controlling the desktops of most of the world is not enough; now that Eurasia (America Online) and Eastasia (Sun Microsystems) have allied together in the ever oscillating world of technological commerce warfare, Microsoft must do something to further create proprietary content on everyone's bookshelf and in his or her vocabulary. Maybe I am just cynical (according to the current dictionaries which are probably now obsolete and, at the very least, not taught at the best and most trendy five-hundred-dollars-a-day technological education solutions provider).

     I am already constrained already to the Official Microsoft Paradigm when I technically write (rest assured, friends, most technical documentation for computers comes down from Mt. Silicon filtered through the Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications). Now Microsoft wants to compile my English language with the same attention to detail that often elicits the blue screen of death on Windows NT or prevents my Word 97 from accurately dealing with numbered lists or Master Documents. Frank Abate, editor for United States dictionaries for Oxford University press agrees, having seen the dictionary. He calls it a "beta version of a dictionary."

     Of course, Abate does not surf the waves of paranoia. I, on the other hand, have read enough Orwell and William Lutz to know that to control a population, you must control its thoughts. Change the language to mean what you want it to mean, as those who have stormed college campuses and consciousness have done, and suddenly rape and oppression occur in every male and female relationship and, as the Encarta New Word Order Dictionary reminds us, "lady friend" and "hard of hearing" carry potentially offensive meanings. Did I mention our Revered Leader, Uncle Bill, merits a photograph but that traitor to Oceania, John F. Kennedy, does not nor does the Hero of the Revolutionary War, George Gordon Meade. He led the Union forces, citizen, and if you remember differently, such as the fact that General Meade fought in the Civil War, please report to Room 101 for deprogramming and reinstallation.

     Just when I start to foam at the mouth, Richard Bready, Microsoft's editorial director (Premeir of Propoganda, brothers!) assures us that "all dictionaries contain mistakes. If you are a lexicographer, it's possible to find this level of error in any dictionary. This is not the result of any haste to publish. This is the result of publishing a dictionary." Ah, I feel better now.

     As I said, just when I start to foam at the mouth, I fail a reality checksum and reexamine the situation. No, it's not the delusion of some dystopian Microsoft future that bugs me. It's Microsoft's audacity to enter hurl this thunderbolt like a Cardinals middle reliever and attempt to cobble together a definitive dictionary. With all the foresight and integrity of a leader in all that's wrong with the software industry. This industry spawned such words as Kludge, to clump together software bits into a mostly functional product wherein most of the parts do not function as designed, but the customer will never know, and spaghetti code, program lines so convoluted and dispersed that you cannot follow the logic.

     I'm afraid Microsoft will play the same sort of slops with English. The de facto standard of discourse, both written and spoken, among our countrymen has decayed quite a bit through other means and the country's thought might have followed. Now Microsoft, with its brave new dictionary, seeks to make that decline the de jure standard through foolish caveats, incorrect or omitted pronunciations, or plain inaccuracies. Bugs that Microsoft will fix in patches in the future or that you can ask about in a call to its lexicographers and other members of the Junior Anti-Sex League for sixty dollars an instance.

     Maybe I am just cynical, but it depends what dictionary you use. In Redmond English 2.0, they might pronounce it "Kinical" which might mean I just like to go to movies.