A friend told me about the new Oxford Junior Dictionary and the Telegraph's article on it. Didn't know if any of you knew anything about it and was wondering what you thought, especially now that some of the members are bringing some juniors to join us. I gathered from reading some of the comments that this is not a well received piece of information.
::speechless:: People, the point of a dictionary is to help kids with words they don't KNOW ALREADY! Most kids already know what an MP3 player is, for Chrissakes!!!! It's things like "heather" and "vicar" that are going to crop up in their summer reading, and they won't have a clue as to what those things are!!! GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!
Well, the list is fairly long. The picture isn't quite the same anymore when you just take a look at all the words. "They replaced mythological terms like goblin and elf/ all those animal names/ plants/... with technical ones like broadband!" could also be proven with it. I think they just went a bit hyperbole when trying to modernize the content. And the news went a bit hyperbole once again trying to prove the decline of the Western world. The junior dictionaries I know always have a very limited number of articles. In this case, we don't even get a glimpse (in the article) which ones are still in it. Jesus and all the Saints may still get their mention, as well as various religions, we don't know. I mean, they also dropped I hope it doesn't say something about the UK eating culture.
*reads the Words Put In section* So... basically... they've put in the words that any kid is going to know anyway, being the modern kid that he is, and removed a large section of words - some of which arguably justified, but the quite a few bringing a rather puzzled expression to my face... Why does "modern" have to equal "stupid"? I think that the idea of editing the words in the new edition was a good idea in theory, but the end result of it had a rather lame result.
