SUICIDE IN THE DICTIONARY.

April 9, 2007 by 11 Comments

No, it’s not a microcosmic tragedy, it’s a Language Log post by Geoff Nunberg about how Merriam-Webster dictionaries wound up with a definition of suicide that includes the phrase “especially by a person of years of discretion and of sound mind,” which is (as Geoff says) plainly wrong. It’s a fascinating account, written with the usual Nunberg clarity and elegance, of how incautious editing and condensation can create blatant error.

Comments

  1. Jangari says
    April 10, 2007 at 3:05 am

    I agree that the term suicide on its own doesn’t convey the ‘years of discretion and of sound mind’ component, in fact it seems to me that this would be informed more by the concept of euthanasia being invoked by the phrase assisted suicide.
    Nunberg makes a sound point of course, that this added component should not be included in a definition of suicide.
    Off the point a little, I’ve been wondering a lot lately about the abstract concept dictionary often occurring with the, rather than specifying which dictionary, or simply calling it a dictionary. It implies objective meaning, which, in this post-modern world, is not the case.

  2. Ginger Yellow says
    April 10, 2007 at 7:45 am

    It’s interesting that the OED doesn’t include the “sound mind” part at all, even as a legal definition.

  3. MMcM says
    April 10, 2007 at 2:03 pm

    Jaŋari, how about the newspaper?

  4. languagehat says
    December 13, 2024 at 10:54 pm

    The OED, as Nunberg says, used to define suicide as “The or an act of taking one’s own life, self-murder”; the entry was revised in 2020 and the definition now reads:

    The action or an act of taking one’s own life. Cf. suicide n.² A.1.

    Suicide is held to be a sin in some religions and classed as a crime in many societies; for example, laws against suicide existed in English common law until 1961. The former criminal status of the act of suicide is the origin of the common collocation to commit suicide (see commit v. Phrases P.6). Cf. self-murder n. 1.

  5. Y says
    December 13, 2024 at 11:45 pm

    The omission of commas in the original makes it even worse. Years of discretion? Years of discretion plus years of sound mind?

  6. David Marjanović says
    December 14, 2024 at 10:08 am

    Why’d you need a comma? Of sound mind and of years of discretion.

  7. Stu Clayton says
    December 14, 2024 at 10:33 am

    Why’d you need a comma? Of sound mind and of years of discretion.

    One is needed to avoid the slight ambiguity as to how to parse the structure of the words in their original sequence:

    especially by a person of years [of discretion and of sound mind]
    as well as
    especially by a person of [years of discretion] and of [sound mind]

    By the familiar technique of rearranging the words, you avoid any parsing ambiguity.

    By having changed the problem, and thus the solution, it becomes meaningless to protest the suggestion of how to resolve the original problem.

  8. Stu Clayton says
    December 14, 2024 at 10:50 am

    Never mind thinking outside the box. What box ? Here it proved more useful to think outside the comma.

    Evidenzen in Probleme verwandeln, indem man die Prämissen aufhebt. One way to do that is to change the subject.

  9. mollymooly says
    December 14, 2024 at 1:29 pm

    Nunberg says, ‘people are often reluctant to speak of suicide when the choice to die seems defensible or at least rational, in the same way we don’t use “homicide” to describe soldiers who kill in wartime’ — don’t we? For me “homicide” includes “justifiable homicide”. I can Google “accidental homicide” and “excusable homicide”. I didn’t watch “Homicide: Life on the Street”, but it’s plausible that in some episodes the titular homicide turned out not to be criminal.

  10. languagehat says
    December 14, 2024 at 1:56 pm

    in the same way we don’t use “homicide” to describe soldiers who kill in wartime’ — don’t we?

    I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard anyone use the word in that context, and it seems very odd.

  11. Y says
    December 14, 2024 at 2:54 pm

    “Homicide” involves at least the possibility of illegality. Soldiers who kill, like executioners, are doing what is expected of them.

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