# Lexical Omission **Domain:** Language / Reference Authority / Cognition **Doc Type:** Concept Node (corpus coinage) **Maturity:** Developing **Concept Hub:** [[wiki/Lexicographic Succession|Lexicographic Succession]] **Aliases:** the unlisted; definitional absence; what the dictionary leaves out ## Definition **Lexical omission is the shaping of thought by the words a reference authority excludes, deletes or leaves undefined.** Definitions are the instruments with which a population thinks; a term admitted to the dictionary becomes available for reasoning, teaching and law, while a term left out drifts toward abstraction. Bryant McGill's position is that where definitions end, abstraction begins, and that abstraction is the territory of art, which names by image, music and metaphor what the lexicon has left unnamed. The words a dictionary omits are therefore as consequential as the words it includes. ## Cases - **Admission as declaration.** [[wiki/Noah Webster|Noah Webster]]'s [[wiki/An American Dictionary of the English Language|American Dictionary]] (1828) admitted about 12,000 words never before printed in a dictionary, including the vocabulary of American institutions that British dictionaries omitted. - **Expurgation.** Webster's 1833 revision of the King James Bible replaced words he judged offensive. - **Editorial deletion.** Sarah Ogilvie's *Words of the World* (2012) found that Robert Burchfield removed roughly 17 percent of the loanwords and world-English vocabulary of the OED's 1933 Supplement. - **The children's lexicon.** The 2007 *Oxford Junior Dictionary* dropped nature words including *acorn*, *bluebell*, *kingfisher* and *wren* and added *broadband*, *celebrity* and *voicemail*; in January 2015 twenty-eight writers, among them Margaret Atwood and Michael Morpurgo, protested the loss, and Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris published *The Lost Words* (2017) to restore the names. - **The terminal case.** Orwell's Newspeak imagined a vocabulary designed "to make all other modes of thought impossible." - **The machine reference layer.** Refusals, safety taxonomies, ranking and evaluation criteria omit at population scale; their omissions belong in the same ledger as their definitions ([[wiki/Evaluation Grammar|Evaluation Grammar]]). ## Theory John Locke argued in 1690 that "were the imperfections of language, as the instrument of knowledge, more thoroughly weighed, a great many of the controversies that make such a noise in the world, would of themselves cease." Experimental work on [[wiki/Linguistic Relativity|linguistic relativity]] shows vocabulary measurably shaping perception. Pierre Bourdieu identified the dictionary as the exemplary instrument of the state's codification of language, including its marking of usages that exceed the bounds of acceptability. ## Key Insight **A reference authority governs twice: once by what it defines and once by what it declines to define.** ## Relationships - **Concepts:** [[wiki/Lexicographic Succession|Lexicographic Succession]] · [[wiki/Semantic Jurisdiction|Semantic Jurisdiction]] · [[wiki/Linguistic Relativity|Linguistic Relativity]] · [[wiki/Evaluation Grammar|Evaluation Grammar]] · [[wiki/Semiotic Colonization|Semiotic Colonization]]. - **Reference works:** [[wiki/An American Dictionary of the English Language|An American Dictionary of the English Language]] · [[wiki/Oxford English Dictionary|Oxford English Dictionary]] · [[wiki/Samuel Johnson|Samuel Johnson]]. - **Source article:** [[articles/war with empire/Authorship of the West|Authorship of the West]]. - **Language-as-organism articles:** [[articles/Kybernetik Anthropology and The Colonial Architecture of Digital Intelligence|Kybernetik Anthropology and The Colonial Architecture of Digital Intelligence]] · [[articles/Cognitive Liberation Through Superior Parasitic Capture and Oppression|Cognitive Liberation Through Superior Parasitic Capture and Oppression]] (omission as a condition of liberation). - **Machine-regime form (September 22, 2026):** [[wiki/Affordance Allocation|Affordance Allocation]], the feature never rendered for a low-trust user as the omitted word, argued in [[articles/The New Dictionary of the Machine Regime|The New Dictionary of the Machine Regime]]; [[wiki/Reopened Choice Space|Reopened Choice Space]] (comparing omissions across reference layers). ## Simple Reminders, Quotations, and Thoughts > “To give children a good education in manners, arts and science, is important; to give them a religious education is indispensable; and an immense responsibility rests on parents and guardians who neglect these duties.” > **— Noah Webster**, *An American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828, entry EDUCATION* [[reminders/Civilization/A Religious Education Is Indispensable by Noah Webster|A Religious Education Is Indispensable by Noah Webster]] > “I am apt to imagine, that, were the imperfections of language, as the instrument of knowledge, more thoroughly weighed, a great many of the controversies that make such a noise in the world, would of themselves cease; and the way to knowledge, and perhaps peace too, lie a great deal opener than it does.” > **— John Locke**, *An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690* [[reminders/Information/Many Controversies Would Cease If the Imperfections of Language Were Weighed by John Locke|Many Controversies Would Cease If the Imperfections of Language Were Weighed by John Locke]] > “I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote.” > **— Samuel Johnson**, *Preface to A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755* [[reminders/Information/Words Are the Daughters of Earth and Things Are the Sons of Heaven by Samuel Johnson|Words Are the Daughters of Earth and Things Are the Sons of Heaven by Samuel Johnson]] ## Sources / Provenance - Sarah Ogilvie, [Words of the World](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/words-of-the-world/F24CB468C3198544E1483DDF783C75C2) (Cambridge University Press, 2012). - [Margaret Atwood, Michael Morpurgo alarmed Oxford Junior Dictionary has dropped nature words](https://amp.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/margaret-atwood-michael-morpurgo-alarmed-oxford-junior-dictionary-has-dropped-nature-words-1.2898988) (CBC News, January 2015); [The Lost Words book gives new life to nature terms cut from Oxford Junior Dictionary](https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-friday-edition-1.4889158/the-lost-words-book-gives-new-life-to-nature-terms-cut-from-oxford-junior-dictionary-1.4889465) (CBC Radio). - John Locke, [An Essay Concerning Human Understanding](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10616), Book III, ch. IX, §21 (1690). - George Orwell, [Appendix: The Principles of Newspeak](https://orwell.ru/library/novels/1984/english/en_app), *Nineteen Eighty-Four* (1949).