Bro, could you really say that in the 1990s?
The world was supercharged with events that seemed to change everything. Like it always was. And, like always, this time it was serious. The keys to Hong Kong were handed back to China, scientists cloned Dolly the sheep; in Britain, Tony Blair became prime minister after almost two decades of Conservative rule.
I had actually forgotten what the 1990s were really like, until I spotted a Stuff story about a racist dictionary entry. It appeared back then that you could forget your old self, from decades past, and even the world you inhabited.
Certainly, I recalled I was a colossal idiot across the decade, from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the Y2K bug, and never paid much attention to anything important. But the outlines of my old self were wiped by the people and technology and ideas of this new exciting century. In other words, I was erased by time. I might as well be a new person. So I was left with a question: how bad were we back then?
Learning te reo Ma¯ ori in full immersion, as I am doing at Te Wa¯ nanga o Raukawa, on the
Ka¯ piti Coast, means you have to evict your first language during those precious hours in the classroom. It was toughest at the beginning, when most of us had only a handful of words left to throw around. I have become better at speaking te reo, but at the start it felt like I wore a constant expression of confusion: all scrunched eyes and tilted head, like a puzzled hound.
Learning te reo Ma¯ ori has been like experiencing a gradual sense of becoming focused. Blurry sentences and muffled sounds become sharpened. (This is my regular reminder that other people, Ma¯ ori, Pa¯ keha¯ , should do it too. For themselves, for te reo Ma¯ ori, for this country.)
One of the things that happens when you’re learning a new language, and faced with lots of new words, is that you constantly scramble for a dictionary. You can’t just keep asking what this word or that word means; nothing would get said. So you hit up dictionaries – but relying on them is like living out of a suitcase. Or maybe like living in a suitcase. There’s not much air in there, and the real experience of being in a language comes from using it with other living, breathing humans.
I mention the limitation of dictionaries because of that Stuff story about the 1997 edition of the Oxford New Zealand Dictionary. (Because, after all, what’s more New Zealand than Oxford?)
In a racist nutshell, the dictionary defined the meaning of the word ‘‘bro’’ in a way that linked it to Ma¯ ori, Ma¯ ori familial connections, Ma¯ ori gangs and, in a puzzling example of its possible use, Ma¯ ori rape. Oxford University Press, you are definitely not my bro.
I understand that the edition, now apparently out of print, is 20 years old. But it is the response from the dictionary publisher’s spokeswoman that genuinely bothered me.
The publisher didn’t necessarily agree with the definitions it provided: it just recorded the ‘‘living language’’ of the time, she said.
I know I might have lost touch with the zeitgeist of the 90s, but for the life of me I don’t ever remember the word ‘‘bro’’ having any other general meaning than the one it has now.
Everybody uses it, Ma¯ ori and Pa¯ keha¯ , good and bad, and it’s generally a term of affection.
Excitingly, since the dark ages of the 90s, the publisher has blasted the dust off the world of curated definitions with The New Zealand Oxford
Dictionary. It’s at least several centimetres more New Zealand with the switcheroo in the title alone.
The latest edition features a definition of ‘‘bro’’ in line with the apparently more enlightened current usage, which doesn’t include explicit links to Ma¯ ori gangs and sexual violence.
Let’s face it, the fault was with the old dictionary itself. It was a bum record of the history of the word in this country.
Now they rewrite history again when they say it was us, not them.
The good thing is that we have reshaped ourselves from the 90s. Time’s not always our enemy. These days we apply more scrutiny to what used to be untouchable: supposed objective scholarly research.
As long as it is undertaken by humans, it should be judged the result of feelings, as much as pure reason. In fact, there’s no such thing as pure reason in humans, even if it is in the dictionary.
The good thing is that we have reshaped ourselves from the 90s. Time’s not always our enemy.