English has always defied attempts to control it
Lee Anderson’s interpretation puts him clearly at odds with the dictionary ”, which in 2016 had us all desperate for an escape from the circulatory hell that was “Brexit means Brexit”, the mantra of the then PM Theresa May. While the definition itself, when it came, was never going to be earth-shattering – “the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, and the political process associated with it” – it offered for most people the validation they were looking for.
Such fundamental disagreement over the true meaning of a word is echoed in the continued debate over the definition of “antisemitism”, which has taken on a new urgency as a consequence of the devastating Israeli bombardment of Gaza and in the wake of a surge of abhorrent attacks on Jewish communities.
But the arguments do raise a key question – who really sets down the linguistic law? Is the dictionary the final arbiter, or can politicians and organisations decide on their own working definitions, even if they are at odds with the accepted view?in 1755, he was intent upon fixing English before it slid over the precipice. He wished to freeze the language for posterity in order to safeguard it against the advances of slang and obscenity.
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