Esquivalience | Hacker News Reader

Esquivalience

en.wikipedia.org

96 pointsarb9925 comments

As the editor of a slang dictionary that accepts user submissions, I've seen many terms submitted to my dictionary that have become accidental esquivaliences.

One great example is "poonj," meaning to have sexual intercourse. The submitter included some etymological claims, in part that the term originated in the language of the Ojibwe native Americans. I find that pretty suspect, though it did appear on the site for some time before I removed it. The definition and the etymology were printed in the second edition of Cassell's Dictionary of Slang. To their credit, they did include "allegedly".

http://books.google.com/books?id=5GpLcC4a5fAC&pg=PA1120&...

I'm not too concerned about the copyright aspect, though. And actually, I'm still unclear on the extent to which dictionary definitions are copyrightable.

I don't think dictionary definitions are. However, if I make up a word, that is copyrightable as it is my creation, or IP, or whatever term you wish to use.

Similar to putting a fake street on a map, I would think.

Actually, a fake street is not copyrightable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street#Legal_issues

    A United States federal court found that copyright traps are not
    themselves protectable by copyright. There, the court
    stated: "[t]o treat 'false' facts interspersed among actual facts
    and represented as actual facts as fiction would mean that no one
    could ever reproduce or copy actual facts without risk of
    reproducing a false fact and thereby violating a copyright . . .
    . If such were the law, information could never be reproduced or
    widely disseminated." (Id. at 733)

I was just discussing this with my co-worker.

How is a new dictionary supposed to source definitions without using current dictionaries? Aren't existing dictionaries essentially the "canon"?

> How is a new dictionary supposed to source definitions without using current dictionaries? Aren't existing dictionaries essentially the "canon"?

No, because that isn't how dictionaries work. Dictionaries, and this goes back to the very first dictionaries, have always paid people to look at current usage and write definitions based on that. Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive; they reflect usage, not control it.

The OED is well-known for its citations backing up its definitions, and they have a very strong bias towards actual usage as opposed to other dictionaries.

Edited to add: Some dictionaries are prescriptive to an extent. Those are the ones that define terms used in a controlled vocabulary, such as technical terms used in a specific field. When the CRC handbook says that this is what 'butyl' means, for example, it is pretty well taken to be prescriptive among chemists.

The wikipedia article doesn't say, but I'm curious if "esquivalience" or "dord" (another example) have been used in error to support their fictitious definitions, thus becoming suitable for inclusion in newer dictionaries.

> I'm curious if "esquivalience" or "dord" (another example) have been used in error to support their fictitious definitions, thus becoming suitable for inclusion in newer dictionaries.

This would be interesting: Can adding a word to a dictionary be a method of introducing it into the language as it is actually used? I don't know, and, you're right, nobody seems to talk about that. This is the kind of thing you need corpus linguistics to figure out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_linguistics

> Corpus linguistics is the study of language as expressed in samples (corpora) of "real world" text. This method represents a digestive approach to deriving a set of abstract rules by which a natural language is governed or else relates to another language.

Finding out how (or whether) a given word is used is right up that field's alley.

Very similar to the effect when an otherwise "non-notable" wikipedia page is cited in the public press, and then cites the article citing it as a way to claim notability.

Thanks for this post, I sometimes feel as if this is the world's least well made distinction. So many people seem to have constructed the idea that dictionaries instruct the use of language not vice versa.

"Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive; they reflect usage, not control it."

I've heard rumors that there are lexicographers have other ideas about this, but I've never actually found anything about lexicography other than what you've described.

> The OED is well-known for its citations backing up its definitions

A bit OT, but if you enjoy the sort of info in the OED and are interested in how it was created, this book is an interesting read: http://www.amazon.com/Professor-Madman-Insanity-English-Dict...

Reminds me of when people caught bing stealing google's search results by indexing really long weird urls in google that had no incoming links.

The related page for Trap Street (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street) is also very interesting. It talks about "secret streets" cartographers put in their maps to protect their copyright.

Previous HN discussion about that concept: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4992748

The real issue is that due diligence on the word was not done. The copyright this is a load of hogwash, in my opinion looks for words that you need to define in another dictionary is acceptable practice (however, copying the definition verbatim is not).

It's almost like saying "you have a thread scheduler in your operating system and are violating copyright." No, that is a core component of an operating system, just like a word is a core component of the English language (fictitious or not, once it enters an accepted dictionary it becomes a word - other dictionaries are forced to define it due to the nature of language).

The idea was not to claim copyright on the definition, but use the inclusion of the definition in another work as an indication that this other work is a copy of the original work in its entirety.

Mapmakers have been doing this for a long time.

Some search engines too! https://www.google.com/search?q=hiybbprqag

Seems like a perfectly cromulent word

Rather disinterpritive and conflascating, if you ask me

I initially misread esquivalience as esquivalence and took it to mean estimated equivalence, as in the word that is to equivalence what guesstimate is to estimate.

Apple, how dare you put a dictionary with a fake word on my Dock. Come on.

The dictionary is sourced from the Oxford dictionary. Or is this another ostracize Apple poe's law posts? They're getting hard to detect.

I assume it's a non serious posting about the fact that this word is indeed in Apple's default dictionary, which many of us can immediately verify with a three-finger tap: Esquivalience

It's especially fun because my popup shows the fake definition at the top, and the wikipedia explanation below it :) - not sure if that's because of my settings or if it is the default behaviour.

Phone books do this too.

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