Guest blog from Maria Spadafora
Can anyone enlighten me as to why the powers that be at Oxford English Dictionary see fit to remove words, and as a by-product, history from our language?
Learning that phrases such as “OMG” and “sexting” have recently been added doesn’t bother me – language and its meaning is constantly on the move. Why only this morning I felt compelled to browse my dictionary of Womanwords only to learn that “vagina” was originally a type of scabbard and served as fanny-slang for donkeys years before being promoted to an official anatomical term in the late C17th. However it seems whenever the Oxford English Dictionary (let’s call it the OED from now on) adds new words, it removes some old ones as if to say “Well, we need to make space for this new mass produced print from Ikea, so those vintage flying ducks have just got to go…”
Learning that “tape cassette” has been removed from the dictionary has left me all discombobulated, which is not a particularly fashionable word, and most certainly not text friendly, but still – to my knowledge – appears in the OED. And do you know what they’ve added? Bloody fucking “jeggings”. Tapes are outmoded, but jeggings are very in, apparently. Well I beg to differ.
You only have to read Cassettes From My Ex to get an idea of just how tapes have featured in many of our lives. The editor, Jason Bitner, rightly points out that mixtapes are “..the godfather of sexting!” I have a treasured collection of mixtapes, and have created many for friends over the years. They represent time, effort, love and skill that is lacking from a CD or MP3 mix. And I’ve come across many a charity shop bargain on vinyl where the original owner has ticked off tracks and written in the margins “recorded to tape” – possibly as a back up, or to play in their car, but most likely because that process of recording something to tape was a way of ensuring a song’s longevity.
Many of the tapes I own reflect a very particular period in time and space – Fenland pop, punk and pap from long-gone (but not forgotten) Lincolnshire bands. They’re of no significance to most people, but to a select group of now middle-aged musos and muses they represent our youth. And some old punk tracks on my mixtapes are so obscure they cannot be downloaded from iTunes and the like (though if you’re lucky and have a fair few quid to spare you can possibly find vinyl copies on Ebay). These tapes still exist, even if the bands don’t, so how can the word “tape” be removed from our language? I seriously don’t get it.
So I’ve written letter of complaint, short enough to cram into those last few seconds of side one on a C60, thus avoiding unnecessary hiss. Here it is:
Dear OED word decider people,
You may have the power to remove tape cassettes from your poncey pages, but not from our homes and our hearts. Tapes still rock, so let me leave you with two words that should leave no room for confusion or misinterpretation – bugger off.
Yours faithfully,
Maria Spadafora
What – they aren’t even listing it as ‘archaic’?
No, thougt not – considering they still include words not used for hundreds of years. See http://bit.ly/ndiG5o
The OED never remove words from the dictionary. They just choose not to include them in certain versions – single volumes are merely abridged forms of the full OED. The only places “cassette tape” has been removed from is some of the versions people buy in shops. It’s still in the full OED and the online version. All this is bloody nostalgia. You wouldn’t even have noticed if they hadn’t sent out a press release about it, designed to get ageing hipsters frothing at the mouth about jeggings.
“Once a word is added to the OED it is never removed; OED provides a permanent record of its place in the language. The idea is that a puzzled reader encountering an unfamiliar word in, say, a 1920s novel, will be able to find the word in the OED even if it has been little used for the past fifty years. Our smaller dictionaries of current English, such as the Oxford Dictionary of English and the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, tend to include new vocabulary more rapidly. These dictionaries are designed to be as up to date as possible, and are frequently revised, but their new entries are usually based on the same solid body of evidence.”
Agree with P. Just looked online and it’s still there, just not in the print edition I’m assuming. Also from what I can see it’s never even been listed as a word in its own right, but rather as a compound listed under “cassette”.
And even if it was taken offline as well, isn’t the term “tape cassette” already covered by both the words “tape” and “cassette”…?
Mind you, given that you believed the story to be true, this is a great post, beautifully written, about the losses that occur when formats change.
Also, the OED doesn’t get to ‘remove words from our language’, it can only remove words from its dictionary (or versions thereof). The OED has no magic powers, or supreme authority. To assume it has, is to offer it the power that you’re saying it’s misusing… Just as we make our own mixtapes, we make our own language. The OED can only try to describe our language (more or less accurately, as it may be).
Fab comments that answer my question, thanks. It did seem bonkers that words could be ‘removed’, especially when you can still buy said item from Tesco. Though I maintain that choosing which words stay and go from concise versions is a form of editorial control.
I have most definitely frothed and taken the bait, but won’t apologise for bloody nostalgia! That we can record our own personal histories on digital cameras and phones is taken for granted these days, but if you find an old Memorex with you and your mates mucking about making silly voices as kids, or a mixtape a deceased loved one made you – that is treasure.
That’s about the memories, not the format. I have young relatives who think the same about their old Bebo and Myspace profiles and playlists, YouTube videos they made etc.
P, it’s equally about the format as it is about the memories. Cassettes were a form of sonic empowerment to my generation, just like social networking has been to our younger relatives. But these younger relatives will never hold a Bebo profile in the palm of their hand and remember the day someone handed them the cassette, or recall the afternoon spent goofing about singing over the top of records. If you lose the actual object the memories go with it.
Attachment to objects might be how your memory works. It’s by no means the case for everyone. I’m all about the content and not the wrapping. Good job too, else my house would be even fuller of stuff than it already has to be.
More tape nostalgia here… http://www.flickr.com/photos/67330590@N04/
my cousins and i used to post each other tapes of us talking instead of writing letters.
I grew up with them and was a mixtape making devotee, spending half my life carefully ‘poised over the pause button’ (a bonus point for John Peel listening 80s indie fans if you get that reference). But this is no more than nostalgia. They were a crap format and that’s why they died. They sounded appalling, all that hiss you had to drown in Dolby, and they degraded badly too. There’s a good reason they were superseded. Tapes aren’t like vinyl, which is actually a wonderful format that reproduces music beautifully.
There are still so many great ways to make ‘mixtapes’, so you’ll get no tears from me for the death of the cassette tape.
“Tapes aren’t like vinyl” – that’s the point David, they weren’t. I think the nostalgia here is not as black and white as analogue versus digital, but more about the influence that the act of recording and sharing had on lives. If you were in a band in the 80’s the cassette was the weapon of choice for getting your music out there – vinyl was something you listened to and looked at and which you couldn’t make yourself.
Degredation of tape is very much over-hyped. Yes, the cassettes I played over and over and over again, in my car and bedroom and walkman, and which I lost the covers for and dropped and trod on and so on don’t sound so good these days. It’s the same for my CDs and memory sticks though too, but I have to say I’m still fonder of my mangy old tapes than I am of my scratched CDs. Moreover the ones I looked after still play absolutely fine, and as the original poster wrote, some of them contain things you can’t download from the internet.
Whatever the story is with the OED, cassettes remain a milestone in our culture – thanks for keeping it reel-to-reel Maria.