-New Dictionary Reflects Post-Christian Era?
by Dr. D ~ December 12th, 2008
Oxford University Press’ latest edition of its Junior Dictionary of English leave out a lot of words that are a significant part of the Christian and Biblical heritage. the British publisher omitted words such as minister, chapel, sin, altar, disciple and devil, as well as dozens of terms it believed were ‘outdated’.
According to Vineeta Gupta, head of children’s dictionaries at Oxford University Press:
“… Nowadays, the environment has changed. We are also much more multicultural. People don’t go to church as often as before. Our understanding of religion is within multiculturalism, which is why some words such as Pentecost or Whitsun would have been in 20 years ago but not now.”
Not everyone in the UK is happy with the new approach. Professor Alan Smithers of Buckingham University observed:
“We have a certain Christian narrative which has given meaning to us over the last 2,000 years. To say it is all relative and replaceable is questionable. The word selections are a very interesting reflection of the way childhood is going, moving away from our spiritual background and the natural world and toward the world that information technology creates for us.”
Response: Does the new dictionary merely reflect ‘post-Christian’ views of intellectuals in the UK, particularly those at Oxford U. Press? Or does it reflect actual changes in British culture itself?
Sadly, the UK and all of Europe seems to be in the midst of a ‘post-Christian’ era or mode at the very same time that Islam is on an historic rise on the continent–filling the spiritual vacuum. *Top
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January 13th, 2009 at 7:43 pm
Control the words we use and you control the way we think. It happened when we ‘feminized’ the language, and it is happening again as we de-Christianize the language.
January 13th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
Harold-
Spot on.