Convocation 2018 Welcome Address

Good morning, everyone! (Cheers.)

I am so pleased to be standing here with you this morning. To be beginning this new school year, this new moment in your life and mine, to serve you, Mount Holyoke, and this moment in history and to be celebrating this day with what is probably the largest class ever at Mount Holyoke. (Cheers.) So, first things first, let’s start with a warm welcome to the class of 2022! (Cheers.) Let us not forget that among them, our new transfer students! (Cheers.) New Frances Perkins scholars! (Cheers.) And visiting students from all over the world! (Cheers.) Welcome to you all.

It is also, of course, such a pleasure to welcome home our returning students! (Cheers.) Welcome back, class of 2021! (Cheers.) Come on, let’s hear it from 2021! (Cheers.) Class of 2020! (Cheers.) And our fabulous seniors. The class of 2019! (Cheers.) Thank you. To the faculty, in their own colorful regalia, which they just took off cause it’s too hot. (Cheers.) We’re here, we’re here to celebrate. Let’s give them a huge cheer, faculty, would you please stand? (Cheers.) And to our extraordinary staff, here visibly in their turquoise T-shirts and their baseball caps. Crews are all over campus working hard for you. Thank you to the staff. (Cheers.) We, together, are Mount Holyoke.

Now, when I, when I was starting out in college I was fixated on two things. Once I got used to the idea that I was there and that I was actually allowed to be there, I was fixated on two things. These are not two serious things, right. Having enough coffee mugs — (cheers) — right? For the conversations I was going to have. And having the latest bilingual dictionary, which I was sure would pave the way for my academic success. I needed all the help I could get. I was studying languages. This was a big, though single volume, dictionary. Uh, it was, according to the blurb on the cover, “critically acclaimed.” It was “revolutionary.” It was the dictionary that was, I quote, “Better by definition.” (Laughter.)

It was a big investment then, and it was the biggest and most cherished book on my shelf. At some point, in some class, a professor talked about how to use the dictionary. And I thought to myself, “This seems a bit rudimentary for college.” But that class was forever to change my already established relationship with my dictionary and with others that I would subsequently acquire and love almost as much.

Now, you might wonder why I am telling you this. For me, this first finding of this dictionary in particular, and the dictionary more generally, has always been a source of education and delight. And despite what Vogue says, is, it’s been fun. Vogue doesn’t think they’re fun. Through its pages and definitions, and especially through the idioms that I first discovered within it, I came to appreciate not just another language, but its history, its literature, its living culture. It was, for me, a convert to communication. And also a form of growth. Through conversations of coffee I wanted to have not just in college, but in French, and then in Spanish and in Italian. For those of you who’ve read the Common Read know that for Alma in “The book of Unknown Americans,” it’s much more. When she reaches for the dictionary she often feels as if it’s a matter of life and death in those moments when she really needs to communicate. The dictionary, for me, was the place I lived in. It began to shape relationships for me. And it was a refuge when things escaped my understanding or got complicated.

It gave order to things in a way I couldn’t yet see in the literature I was reading or indeed in my life. It seemed reliable, authoritative, complete, and uncontroversial. Dictionaries might strive to be all of those things, but the one thing they are never is complete. And as they’ve moved online, I can Google a word or expression quicker than I can find the page in the dictionary. Publishers have engaged technologies. They follow social media in order to track current usage, what we are saying now in identifying new words, though they’re still not including emojis. (Laughter.)

And the authoritative is being challenged by startups, like Wordnik and crowdsource content like Urban Dictionary. This is convenient and effective and I love its immediacy, it’s range, and it’s currency almost as much as I loved taking home that first bilingual dictionary. So as, all this I was thinking about dictionaries is, was not pure nostalgia. In fact, the real reason that dictionaries are on my mind is precisely because of these advances, and especially because more recently they really might be described as revolutionary. And precisely because their publishers now follow Twitter and track words, not only that we use, but for which we search. A few weeks ago in a new moment in the post-truth era, one that even has seen an escalation of alternative facts, Rudy Giuliani said, “Truth isn’t truth.” Chuck Todd, who was interviewing him at the time, seemed alarmed, and offered, “This is going to become a bad meme.” (Laughter.)

In a subsequent interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo, Giuliani argued that nowadays, “facts are in the eye of the beholder.” In response, just as it did in the response of the coining of “alternative facts,” and indeed to Kellyanne Conway’s definition of feminism, Merriam-Webster tweeted a definition, this time it was a link to its definition for truth. Such tweets but the publishers of dictionaries have become a phenomenon. Merriam-Webster has been called the “master of the subtweet,” “sassy,” and the “political shade queen.” (Laughter.)

Perhaps best of all, in response to a tweet with a definition of faux, one Twitter user asked, who is Merriam Webster and what gives her the right to tell America which word they’re okay to use? (Laughter, cheers.)

Lauren Naturale, who used to be the content and social media manager for Merriam-Webster, certainly wouldn’t claim that right. Her view is that using social channels to make fun of people or order them around would be to deny what we actually know about language. It changes, it belongs to everyone. When Naturale joined Merriam-Webster in 2016, the publisher had 80,000 followers. When she left in 2017, it had 445,000 and it had won Webby awards for the publisher’s work.

She faced criticism from within the organization for what might seem like partisan opinions. But as her boss, Schneider, explains, “The publisher’s tweets are data-driven and fact-based.” And this is what he said, “Part of the dictionary’s role has always been to call balls and strikes for questions of spelling and meaning. But looking at these tweets is trying to school public figures, obscure the more interesting and profound story. We are reporting that a certain public figure’s use of language provoked the curiosity of many Americans and sent them to the dictionary for information about the nuances of spelling, meaning or usage.”

Now Merriam-Webster has almost 725,000 followers on Twitter. And it’s not alone in its efforts. As a New York Times reported in June, dictionary.com, with its 314,000 followers, joined the movement after seeing a huge uptick in the search for misogynist. In response to Roseanne Barr’s comments in May, it tweeted a definition of racist. And on August 29th in response to the primary in Florida, it offered up the definition of dog whistle. On April 25, 2016, Merriam-Webster tweeted one of Lauren Naturale’s personal favorites, the definition of genderqueer, which had just been added to its unabridged dictionary to some readers’ consternation.

That tweet, and the reason why it’s her favorite, and mine, was a lesson in the purpose of a dictionary and how to use one. It read, People keep, one, saying they don’t know what genderqueer means, then two, asking why we added it to the dictionary. (Laughter.) It garnered almost 27,000 likes and was retweeted by over 23,000 Twitter users. Just three days ago, at 8:20 a.m., dictionary.com tweeted, nonbinary gender, the term isn’t as new as you may think. Then it tweeted within half an hour a definition of classism in response to another celebrity’s story. And then, positionality, how your identity influences and potentially biases your understanding and outlook on the world. This is an all-embracing strategy, acting almost as a public service announcement, a message in the public interest disseminated without charge with the objective of raising awareness, changing public attitudes and behaviors towards a social issue. We’re used to thinking as the media as the guardians of fact and the exposers of lies, but as Dennis Barron argues in his blog, lately, it’s the dictionaries.

The emergence of the dictionary as a “political troll” in the words of Time, or as public service announcements. And indeed, the role of Twitter and the internet in stimulating public debate in a democratizing education in its way should not be underestimated. It is a reminder to us that dictionaries are tools, historical records, and living, and evolving documents that don’t have all the words we use or the answers. Rather, they tend to complicate questions of usage and often require cultural and contextual information to makes, how, how to understand or use a word. Well, the definition of truth maybe tweeted as a clarification, its intent beyond rebuke in political and linguistic guardianship is to stimulate rather than to stifle debate, to provoke thought and engagement.

There is something, then, deeply reassuring to me about the fact that there is a 5,000 percent increase in Google searches that seek the meaning of a word in the hope of clarifying and assertion. That is trying to make sense of words, and especially of the ideas they carry in context that challenge our thinking and change our world. Behind the dictionary publishers’ tweets, there is also a labor of love. A linguistic and scholarly rigor. A rigor that includes questions that underpin the lexicographers’ research. At the same time, there’s a recognition that language and its usage change and brings, in turn, change to society. And if you don’t know this, women and young people are a whole generation ahead of language change than others in our society. (Cheers.)

As we unite at Convocation today, we bring many identities to that of a Mount Holyoke student, faculty or staff member. We come from many nations and the, and experiences, we speak many languages and indeed transcultural hybrids of these. And we speak many different truths in our lives and work here together. I would like to think that within our efforts at Mount Holyoke we’re something like new dictionaries, advocates of truth and guardians of fact, namers of the future. Like lexicographers, we are scholars and historians, linguists and journalists, archivists, technologists, and gumshoes. We are not eavesdropping on you as they do on all of us, but although we are actively engaged together in purposeful conversation describing ideas and ideologies, in partnership and in pursuit of new knowledge. Knowledge that will shape, with words, the social realities that describe us, that are evolving and inclusive. You are the future of the lexicon and all it defines. (Cheers.)

As I was thinking about all of this I learn that this year as part of orientation for the class of 2022 — (cheers) — the Orientation team — (cheers) — Orientation team, let’s give them a round of applause! (Cheers.) They made a video and the name of that video is called One-Word Mission. (Cheers.) Among more than 40 words they chose are discovery, balance, discipline, purpose, justice, growth, integrity, resilience, patience, “amor propio,” self-care, focus, innovation, challenge, “limites,” confidence, peace, “multualia,” cultivation, innovation, communication, fun — (cheers) — achieve, shape. (Cheers.)

There were many other words spoken by them and that will be spoken today by those following me. Words that may seize your imagination, prompt you to create your own one-word mission. But there is one thing for sure, we are dictionaries of difference. Original users who seek our origins and experiences in many languages, dialects and accents, and in their myriad variance. We are code-switchers and inventors. Poets and philosophers. Rhetoricians and scientists. So as you head into a new academic year, use your language. In the motto of the Urban Dictionary, to define your world. Welcome, MoHome! (Cheers.)