Upstander

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Grant, as a lexicographer, as a dictionary editor, you know that people are forever sending words to the dictionary that they would like to be included.

Yes, yes they are.

And their chances are usually…

Almost zero.

Not so great.

But what if one of those words had the force of legislation behind it?

Ooh, maybe. Maybe it’s got a chance. What is it?

Well, the word is upstander.

Oh, yeah. Opposite of bystander.

Yes, yes. The opposite of bystander is somebody who stands up for somebody who’s being picked on.

Well, it turns out that in June of this year, the New Jersey State Senate approved a resolution urging Merriam-Webster, Inc., and the Oxford University Press to include the word upstander in their dictionaries.

What’s their motivation for that?

Well, it’s the result of years of campaigning against bullying by New Jersey high school students, the campaign by the high school students.

For other students.

Yes. And I don’t know, a legislative body voting for a word to go into the dictionary?

Yeah, it’s kind of an overreach of power, though.

The dictionary editors consider the evidence and probably are no more likely to be swayed by a legislature than they are by lots of lawyers coming from a big company to tell them that a word is actually trademarked.

Well, yeah.

Right?

Yeah, good point.

On the other hand, I do think there is enough citational evidence for upstander, that is, it’s been used in a lot of places by a lot of people in print over enough years that it’s probably already in the citation files at Oxford University Press and Merriam-Webster’s.

Yes, it is.

And it’s in the ascendancy, I think, and this event will certainly help.

So we’ll see, right?

Here at San Diego at the Museum of Man, where I give my time, they have an exhibit called Instruments of Torture.

And the torture exhibit talks quite a bit about what it’s like to be the opposite of a bystander.

Rather than watching the torture, you are an upstander and you speak out and you say, this is wrong.

We shouldn’t do this.

Let’s do something else.

Oh, interesting.

So that’s what an upstander is.

So they actually use that word.

It’s on the wall and in the description inside the exhibit.

Yeah.

To talk about setting a new course for being better humans, basically.

Excellent.

That’s really interesting.

Yes, it seems to have gained some currency thanks to a book by Samantha Power, the current U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

She used it in her Pulitzer Prize winning book.

But the problem with these word campaigns to get a word in the dictionary is that they assume that the dictionaries change rapidly, and they’re really slow.

You may think when they put out their new words list that they’re just throwing any old slang in there, but really they’re way behind the times almost always.

It just takes a long time to come up with new additions.

But we’ll see.

Yeah, I do hope this one gets in.

I think it’s a great word to use with kids.

You know, be an upstander, something positive.

The thing I would say about this overall, and any dictionary editor will tell you this, is that there are tons, millions of words that aren’t in dictionaries.

Being in a dictionary does not give a word any more legitimacy than if it’s not in the dictionary.

It’s not an official crowning of a word is real.

A word can easily be real and never be included in a dictionary.

Right. The dictionary is more like the phone book than the social register.

Exactly.

Well, we’d love to talk with you about language.

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