Comment by EliteMasterEric [he/him]@hexbear.net on *Permanently Deleted*

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The history of maps is actually pretty hilarious. People would just make shit up cause if you haven’t been there and don’t have another map for comparison who the hell knows? Map makers would also put fake towns on their maps so they could see if anyone was plagiarizing them. It was basically all grifters for a while.

dictionaries do the fake towns thing, but with words

If it’s in a dictionary and has a definition isn’t that just a new real word?

a “real” word is one that people actually use to communicate. i could see a dictionary coinage making its way into real world use, but i don’t know of any such examples

If no one orders a meal but its still on the menu it’s still a meal.

No, the dictionary isnt the king of language. If no one is using word, and the editor just invented that word, you cant go out and use the word expecting anyone to know what youre talking about. It only becomes a word if people know what the fuck youre saying.

Dictionaries describe the language that already exists, they dont create new language from thin air and enforce its use.

Not necessarily. Plenty of dictionaries have been written as attempts at language reform rather than as exercises in just describing existing language as objectively as possible. Noah Webster for example didn’t invent entirely new words, but he pushed certain spelling reforms in his dictionary that in no small part is responsible for American vs British differences such as “Color” vs “Colour”. I can’t think off the top of my head of a dictionary created with significant intention to promote a specific additional vocabulary, but I’d be thoroughly surprised if its never been done before.

With the recent decline of linguistic perscriptivism falling ever more out of vogue, some people seem to have adopted a hardline descriptivist view of language as only ever evolving from unplanned organic use, which is completely ahistorical. There have been many centralized top-down reforms of language, where there was an explicit survey and analysis of dialects across a region, followed by an intentional reformation of the language into a planned form seen as more standardized and consistent. As the Roman Empire dissolved in much of Western Europe, Latin began to fracture into regional isolates that were quickly becoming unintelligable to each other. The Carolingian Empire attempted several language reforms (with varying degrees of success) to create a once-again universally intelligable language. For English, the Court of Chancery played a major part in the standardization of the language, promoting certain styles vocabularies and spellings over others.

Yeah they do. By making up words and putting them in the dictionary they are doing just that.

Every word at some point was “just some guy inventing a word”. I’m sure they were’t ALL dictionary editors, but I’d bet some of them were

I was watching Dateline or some shit like that, and they were interviewing someone about a traumatic event, and they said something along the lines of “I was feeling so many different things, I was having feelings that Webster hasn’t even come up with a word for yet” and i had to pause for a second to take a step back and try on their worldview of linguistics which was so much different than mine.

I’m sure this reflects on their view on linguistics and not just what they said in the moment while recollecting trauma.

The real Mercator Projection is hiding in a desk in Langley.

Well big map and big globe does have a racist, xenophobic conspiracy going on, so there is something to look into about that if you’re not already familiar. A lot of it has to do with a form of white supremacy making white, western counties appear much larger than say continents like Africa and South America

Also imaginary cartography seems to basically be a breeding ground for “the real map isn’t racist enough” versions lol

Yes same with so much alternate history fiction. Vast majority is unreadable racist garbage

Yeah, my brother (crypto fash guy I suspect) reads some alternate history book series that’s “what of the confederates won!” And I assume “and it was good actually!”

Yup very few people end up telling the story, “but what if the Nazis won” and have it be actually a bad thing. Much more interesting to me but in general I grew out of it the more I learned about how they did actually win in many ways, just not militarily.

If I was going to read alt history now a days it would be something a bit more interesting to my tastes like if the soviet union didn’t collapse. That seems much more interesting world building and not so fuckin depressingly gross

Alt history if Germany actually went communist and allied with the Soviet Union: “And then everyone lived happily ever after”

You would have to alter so much other stuff for the Nazis to have ever won the war. They could have maybe done better but winning was really never gonna happen.

What if the Nazis had WON the war?

Idk if you’ve watched a Man in the High Castle but the first season was alright, it was a bit too lib for me to get really into but they at least made it pretty clear it was a bad thing.

Unlike the reality where uhhh, we recruited a bunch of nazis and scientists into high levels of government with high level security clearance 🤔

Final season of it had black communists being supplied by rebels in China as protagonists

Haven’t. I generally think it’s a silly concept because you would have to change so much about the circumstances leading to the war that Germany would have won WW1. The nazis were never going to win.

Well big map and big globe does have a racist, xenophobic conspiracy going on, so there is something to look into about that if you’re not already familiar. A lot of it has to do with a form of white supremacy making white, western counties appear much larger than say continents like Africa and South America

I thought that was just a side effect of the Mercator projection, which happened to be a useful navigational tool (that also, in a “full” map, would make Antarctica an infinite size)

It is, but it makes little sense to keep using it for teaching geography in which people are not using for navigation. It should have evolved by now since the 1500s

Winkel-Tripel all the way, baby

Maps were invented by the bourgeoisie to make people think real estate is real.

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