"Words are for saying things, not doing things."

I’m going to omit all the obvious arguments that this is clever-sounding hogwash, an empty slogan that ironically contradicts itself, because Doug is smarter than I am and already knows them. Because of what he does and teaches, I don’t think Doug believes it either. Irony? Sarcasm? I don’t know. I’ll admit I couldn’t make it through the endless Yippie Manifesto it was attached to, so perhaps it’s some kind of joke too subtle for rubes like me.

But I will say I believe this to be not just a philosophically untenable position on its face, but one of the most dangerous statements I’ve seen come out of an educator’s mouth (or do Tweets come from beaks?) in a long time, representing a facile diminishing of one of our most potent and (sadly) too often untapped and untrained powers as human beings, cultural participants, and members of communities.

If you need an example, look to Washington. We have a President right now who would agree wholeheartedly with– and who lives out– this sentiment about sayin’ and doin’. Words are action… misunderestimate them at your peril.

 Erin McKean TED Talk

McKean’s talk is about how traditional the form of one of our most common references– the dictionary– is, having hardly changed in hundreds of years (it is essentially steam punk technology) and some pointers to how it might be transformed in the light of distributed, networked knowledge and read/write social webs. Some of this distribution is already happening with online dictionaries and dictionary like things of various kinds, integration of dictionary functions into search engines, Wiktionary, etc… but the importance of this talk is not about dictionaries per se as much as it is the concept of the dictionary as a metaphor for ways the social web can be produce levers for knowledge. And not just in the sense of members of that web contributing to a centralized resource, but participants’ own sites as sources themselves.

The exciting possibility is finding more ways to bring together individual small pieces of word wisdom, from magic words to the insight of  irascible linguist bloggers, from one-letter words to the dictionary of grandiloquence, one that includes inveterate word-coiners and language observers alike.

This talk also has me thinking about the knowledge that we believe is passed down to us from our elders. In the talk, McKean refers to the story of the Ham Butt. My mother not only cuts the ends off the ham before she cooks them (which meant we got to fry that tasty piece up for an early treat) but told me this exact story by explanation, attributing it to my great-grandmother, who confirmed it not long before she died. I still do the same, despite knowing better. I have no doubt my great grandmother believed that she originated the story and my mother certainly believes it is a family anecdote. How much of what we think we know as educators, what we have learned can or can’t or should or shouldn’t be done is Ham Butt wisdom?