In response to my post on the anti-Israel bias and anti-Semitism on display at Yourdictionary.com, Israellycool reader Diana writes:
In response to your blog post regarding yourdictionary.com, I wrote to the site with my objections to their miserable examples. Here’s the thread of emails:
Mine to them:
Greetings,
Whom do you have working for you creating examples? Hamas? Hezbollah? I am shocked and upset that Webster’s Dictionary would lend its name and history to an online dictionary filled with anti-semitic examples–actually, it’s beyond anti-semitic; it’s pure hatred and propaganda.
Take for example your “examples” for the word occupation:
The Israeli occupation will never respect the human rights or civil rights of the people.
The only way for Israelis to have security is, quite simply, to end the 35-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.
Your definition of the word “Jew” starts not with the noun form, but with the offensive verb form–“to Jew someone down,” and while you state it is vulgar and offensive, a REAL dictionary begins with the most common usage of a word–which is the NOUN in this case.
Oh, and as is fitting your support of terrorists, you don’t define the word “terrorist,” but rather give synonyms to look up: “subversive, revolutionary, incendiary; see rebel.” Hmmmm…so the people who flew planes into the WTC, for example, are no different to you than the American revolutionaries?
Daniel Webster must be spinning in his grave.
I will make sure that NO students with whom I work EVER use your dictionary–and I will warn the libraries as well.
Be ashamed, be very ashamed.
Diana
Response from the owner:
Dear Ms —–,
It came to our attention this morning that the first definition and an associated idiom for the headword entry “Jew” was offensive. I looked at the entry with our editorial team immediately. While the entry did note that the reference was “vulgar and offensive”, we have decided that explaining the bias is not worth the risk of perpetuating it. Thus, we decided to take the definition and the associated idiom down from the site. We will be notifying the publisher of the dictionary, from whom we license our definitions. In addition, there were some usage examples in the headwords occupation, apartheid and divest, which were inappropriate and we have taken those down as well. Those usage examples were not chosen by our editors but rather had taken from a corpus of billions of words and sentences and had not been flagged before.
Thanks for bringing this to our attention and please accept our deep apologies.
Sincerely,
Howard Love
CEO
YourDictionaryThen my follow-up:
Dear Mr. Love,
Thank you for your attention to this issue.
These types of examples are quite pervasive on the site–too much so to be a coincidence, so if they’re coming from the people from whom you license definitions, you may want to find a new source.
I don’t quite understand what you mean that the usage examples “had taken from a corpus of billions of words and sentences…” Do you have readers providing the examples? Who selects them?
Thank you,
Diana
Then his:
The usage examples are selected by computer algorithms (not people). Unfortunately, those algorithms are not good enough yet at screening for bias though we are working on ways to address that.
Again, my apologies.
-Howard
I pressed again to find out what this algorithm is, and found out that its from “The Corpus” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_of_Contemporary_American_English)
So basically, ANYONE can put in usages and then some algorithm searches and provides them as examples.
Howard Love was not able or willing to address the issue of their using webster.com as a reference on their web site…so I’m still not convinced it’s as accidental as he’d like to lead us to believe.
At least they apologized…now I’ll keep checking the site 🙂
Shalom
Diana
Some readers confirmed the offensive examples I mentioned have been removed. Well done to Diana and the rest of you who wrote to Yourdictionary.com.
