While Oxford University Press, the British publisher of the
Oxford dictionaries, declared those little smartphone
self-portraits its winner last month, the folks at
Merriam-Webster announced "science" on Tuesday.
Oxford tracked
a huge jump in overall usage of selfie, but Merriam-Webster
stuck primarily to look-ups on its website, recording a 176
percent increase for science when compared to last year.
"The more we thought about it, the righter it seemed in that
it does lurk behind a lot of big stories that we as a society
are grappling with, whether it's climate change or environmental
regulation or what's in our textbooks," said John Morse,
president and publisher of Merriam-Webster Inc., based in
Springfield, Mass.
Science, he said, is connected to broad cultural oppositions
— science versus faith, for instance — along with the power of
observation and intuition, reason and ideology, evidence and
tradition. Of particular note, to Merriam-Webster, anyway, is
fallout from the October release of Malcolm Gladwell's latest
book, "David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of
Battling Giants."
Gladwell, a popularizer of scientific thought and research in
best-sellers and The New Yorker magazine, takes on the
challenges of obstacles and the nature of disabilities and
setbacks in the book. But he leaves science itself — according
to some critics — as a rhetorical device for his main mission of
storytelling.
The tweets, blog posts and online commentary about the book —
yay and nay — proliferated as Gladwell hit the road to promote
it. Peter Sokolowski, a lexicographer and editor at large for
Merriam-Webster, called the Gladwell dustup a symptom of where
science stands today.
With the explosion of information and technology, are we all
scientists?
"You have scientists writing long pieces, purportedly reviews
of his new book, basically criticizing him, and then his
response is, 'Hey, buddy. I'm not a scientist. I'm a writer
who's trying to promote the work of scientists. To contextualize
it. To make it accessible.' You know, 'Don't blame me for not
being a scientist' is basically his response," Sokolowski said.
