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Between the Prescriptive and Descriptive: The Challenge for Dictionary Makers

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A review of An English Language Primer Focused on Sri Lanka (Especially for Tamil Readers) by Prof. S.R.H. Hoole.
Foreword by: Prof. Charles Ponnuthurai Sarvan, Germany
Publisher: Baldaeus Theological College, Konesapuri, Trincomalee.
Printers: JR Industries, Uduvil.
Year of Publication: 2022. 340 pp. Rs. 1200 in Sri Lanka, 9786246077020.
(Available at Vijitha Yapa and Sarisavi)

By Suresh Canagarajah

Edwin Erle Sparks Professor,
Departments of Applied Linguistics and English,
Pennsylvania State University, USA.

It is said that the first lexicographer Samuel Johnson ushered a new orientation to language studies when he articulated his intention to document how English language is actually used in his Dictionary of the English language in 1755. Previously, it was the grammarians who held sway on any matters of usage or teaching of a language. The grammarians were prescriptivist in orientation. They articulated the norms of the language for handbooks, textbooks, and curriculum, which spelled out what was correct, according to their technical expertise. Lexicographers, on the other hand, claim their expertise as descriptive—i.e., documenting how grammar is diverse and changing in society, even when it deviates from what grammarians might find objectionable. This way of classifying their differences would also make us treat grammarians as conservative and lexicographers as progressive.

However, things are not so neat. Soon, dictionaries also started to be treated as prescribing norms. When our friends object to our speech and say “But that’s not in the dictionary!” they are treating the lexicographer as the final arbiter of grammatical judgements. Furthermore, it turned out that the judgements of grammarians were misguided because they treated Latin grammatical properties as the norm for English and other languages, based on Latin’s status as an educated lingua franca at that time. To further complicate the descriptive/prescriptive divide, there are different kinds of dictionaries. While dictionaries that feature semantics, etymology, and phonology are the standard ones and are relatively more descriptive, there are other dictionaries of usage (such as Merriam Webster’s Concise Dictionary of Usage or The Oxford Dictionary of American Usage and Style). These usage dictionaries distinguish between meanings to articulate how the usage might be changing, differ according to context (i.e., region or informality) and relate to style (written versus conversation). In these frankly subjective usage dictionaries, the authors have a strong presence and voice, articulating their own preferences. Their examples and descriptions can be conversational and anecdotal, deviating from the brevity and rigor of generic dictionaries.

There’s a new challenge for dictionary makers when English has now become a global lingua franca and nativized in many countries. English has a history of more than 200 years in many postcolonial communities, as in Sri Lanka. In these communities, English has developed local grammatical and lexical norms that are used by millions of speakers within the countries. Not surprisingly, there are now dictionaries of local English for Australia, Canada, Singapore, Nigeria, and the Bahamas. We are now beyond that point when we can debate whether anything other than British or American English should be accepted as legitimate. The famous Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe once said that if English is a global language, it should be allowed to spread and diversify. If someone says a global language should be spoken like the British, they probably don’t appreciate the meaning of “global.”

That nativized Englishes are rule-governed, meaningful, and shared by millions of people leaves prescriptivists with a losing battle. Languages diversifying in new social, cultural, and environmental contexts is a fact of life. “Not deficient but different” has become the slogan among sociolinguists on how to assess postcolonial Englishes that deviate from British or American norms. Note that at one point even American English was perceived as a deficient slang by British people. It took Daniel Webster’s dictionary-making efforts to fight back against this bias and demonstrate that Americans had their local norms that were systematic.

This brief history brings us to the challenges of dictionary makers and language teachers in Sri Lanka. There are a lot of studies on Sri Lankan English now by leading scholars to demonstrate that many local lexical, grammatical, and phonological features are rule-governed. There is even a Dictionary of Sri Lankan English (published by Michael Meyler in 2007). However, when does a mistake become a norm? When does a deviation become regularized to be called Sri Lankan English? That takes a complex social, historical, and political process: i.e., social—many people start using this “deviation” as a norm and it becomes widespread; historical—over a long period of time such usage becomes patterned, regularized, and systematized; political—there is a policy or public opinion that develops an acceptance and even pride in the local norms. Once these processes occur, trying to stop such language change is like the story of King Canute trying to stop the waves with his mere presence (as once argued by the renowned languist Bernard Spolsky). In fact, Samuel Johnson himself wrote in his introduction to the first dictionary: “They that have frequent intercourse with strangers, to whom they endeavour to accommodate themselves, must in time learn a mingled dialect, like the jargon which serves the traffickers on the Mediterranean and Indian coasts. This will not always be confined to the exchange, the warehouse, or the port, but will be communicated by degrees to other ranks of the people, and be at last incorporated with the current speech.” He conceded that norms would change through the diversity of social interactions. However, since not all changes gain acceptance and normativity, there is value in conversations about which of them are acceptable or worth preservation. Textbooks, handbooks, dictionaries, and language teachers play no small role in the development of new norms.

Professor Hoole’s dictionary has the subtitle: “Raising Alarm Bells on Sri Lankan English” in the cover page. As we can see, a strong motivation for him to publish his usage dictionary is what he perceives as deviations from the British English. Though the title doesn’t announce itself as a dictionary, the main section in his book (Part 2) is titled “The Dictionary Section.” Part 1 introduces some grammatical terms which readers might find useful to understand the meanings elucidated in the dictionary section. The author’s preface is 14 pages long and gives useful information on his motivations for writing this book. He says that this book evolves from his experience teaching English to Tamil students in the Baldaeus Theological College. He has also focused on English corrections on his students’ writing while working as an Engineering lecturer at Peradeniya and the Jaffna University College. In this sense, this dictionary emerges from his practical experiences of observing the typical mistakes of Tamil students. He is also wise to target the dictionary to Tamil speakers as he is able to use Tamil in the book to illustrate the points or identify interference from the first language in the use of English. The dictionary features alphabetically organized words to explain differences between similar sounding terms, mistaken usage, fresh local coinages, and specialized registers. The book also features exercises to help readers distinguish words or identify the mistakes in local usage.

It is clear from the preface that Hoole was schooled in British English, both in Christian schools in Sri Lanka and during his graduate studies in the UK. He has had opportunities to be exposed to the norms of British English through social networks, education, and publications. He also describes the books he read as a child and dictionaries that accompanied him into graduate education, such as H. W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (Oxford, 1927). These background details indicate the preferences of the author in the spirit of full disclosure. Referring to errors in the local news media, he states that “reading Sri Lankan English is dangerous to our knowledge of English as bad grammar may be instilled in us in that process of reading bad English” (p. xxiv). He also narrates anecdotes of students from an elite school in Colombo using that ubiquitous Sri Lankanism “bugger” to refer to one’s father as “Pater Bugger”, and criticizes such usage.

It is revealing that Hoole spent much of his life with usage dictionaries such as Fowler’s. His publication is also a usage and style based dictionary, and not descriptive in orientation. The entries are chosen from words featuring frequent errors or confusions to Sri Lankans. In many of the entries, the author offers helpful clarifications. In cases of certain variants, he is reasonable in allowing Sri Lankanisms in less formal contexts, although his preference is for the more formal variant. See, for example, the entries in page 122:

Except, Except for

Both expressions, “Except” and “Except for,” mean excluding the noun that follows:

All of us ate to our full except my mother who felt a little tired.

All of us ate to our full except for my mother who felt a little tired.

Both expressions are said to be correct. But are they? By the Loquacity Rule, “except for” involves an unnecessary word “for,” a pleonasm, and is therefore not the preferred form.

Eyes, I saw with my own eyes

It is needless to say “with my own eyes” in the expression

I saw with my own eyes.

We have a pleonasm in the words “with my own eyes,” because we always see with our own eyes and not other people’s eyes. This is clearly from the Tamil expression, [Tamil example given here].

It is an expression that will, however, stay with us arguing that it is used for emphasis or to say that what the speaker saw refers to a first hand report. Be that as it may, “I saw” is usually good enough.

We can see the Engineering/Math professor in Hoole preferring more economical expressions. In the second example, however, he pragmatically recognizes that the use of “with my own eyes” has become part of local usage and concedes that it can be used for emphasis. It is laudable that the author recognizes the style and context variations in questionable words to allow for diversity.

But in some cases, he is a bit too strict. In page 142, he has the following entry:

How about “I come there”?

This phrase in the heading of this section, and illiterate phrases like it, take the place of the correct

How about my coming there?

How about has to be followed by a noun: How about this? Or How about that?

It is possible that Prof. Hoole might be overlooking the simple distinction between conversational/informal and written/formal usage here. Conversational English grammar doesn’t follow written syntax in even native speaker communities.

Hoole also becomes a bit too prescriptive in page 237 where he chides the common practice of referring to the newspaper as “paper.” He mentions that “paper” refers to the material in which the news is printed, and therefore cannot be used to stand for the newspaper. However, the electronic version of the New York Times announces on its web “Today’s Paper” as an option for readers to click. Similarly, in his treatment of phrases like Thank you very much and Thank you so much, Hoole explains:

However, to me, “so much” implies a comparison like pointing to some rice on a plate and saying I eat only “so much:” Therefore,

“Thank you so much” seems to thank a person a certain amount without saying what that amount is.

I therefore strongly recommend “Thank you very much.”

However, even the usage dictionaries of the British and Americans are more tolerant on this one. They generally state that “Thank you very much” is slightly more formal than “thank you so much”.

Others feel that “very” is a superlative word used to add more emphasis to the appreciation. Therefore, it is not preferred by more reserved speakers who reduce the emphasis with the use of “so.”

These points are meant to demonstrate how complex usage is, especially at the global level for a lingua franca, and not meant to slight Hoole’s painstaking effort in publishing this book.

One has to appreciate his generosity in going outside his field, motivated by a sincere interest in helping local students master English. That the book derives from his teaching, and is still used by him in the theology school, demonstrates that it is not a mere academic exercise. Unlike many books that end unread in bookshelves, this book will be used by teachers and students in Sri Lanka. When there is a dearth of publications from international publishers, compounded now by the unfair currency exchange and inflation, and the lack of an English language publisher in Jaffna, this locally produced book is one that many learners will be able to own—and even treat it as their daily toilet reading (the way Hoole himself read dictionaries when he was growing up, as he describes in his preface). Students can treat the disparity between British English and Sri Lankan English as not mutually exclusive but choices for different contexts. While Sri Lankan English will be used in in-group conversational contexts, those who interact with foreign tourists, business partners, or educational collaborators will appreciate a familiarity with British English. Globalization increasingly calls for “code switching” into different varieties, as speakers shuttle between different communities and contexts where diverse Englishes are used. Therefore, teachers who use this book can remind students of the contexts where the British and formal norms will be useful, and compare the pronouncements in the dictionary with variations in other communities and contexts. Thus Hoole’s dictionary can generate constructive discussions and lessons about language norms.

The author’s website: https://sites.psu.edu/canagarajah/


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Features

Ranking public services with AI — A roadmap to reviving institutions like SriLankan Airlines

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15 hours ago

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2026/03/13

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Efficacy measures an organisation’s capacity to achieve its mission and intended outcomes under planned or optimal conditions. It differs from efficiency, which focuses on achieving objectives with minimal resources, and effectiveness, which evaluates results in real-world conditions. Today, modern AI tools, using publicly available data, enable objective assessment of the efficacy of Sri Lanka’s government institutions.

Among key public bodies, the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka emerges as the most efficacious, outperforming the Department of Inland Revenue, Sri Lanka Customs, the Election Commission, and Parliament. In the financial and regulatory sector, the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL) ranks highest, ahead of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Public Utilities Commission, the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission, the Insurance Regulatory Commission, and the Sri Lanka Standards Institution.

Among state-owned enterprises, the Sri Lanka Ports Authority (SLPA) leads in efficacy, followed by Bank of Ceylon and People’s Bank. Other institutions assessed included the State Pharmaceuticals Corporation, the National Water Supply and Drainage Board, the Ceylon Electricity Board, the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation, and the Sri Lanka Transport Board. At the lower end of the spectrum were Lanka Sathosa and Sri Lankan Airlines, highlighting a critical challenge for the national economy.

Sri Lankan Airlines, consistently ranked at the bottom, has long been a financial drain. Despite successive governments’ reform attempts, sustainable solutions remain elusive.

Globally, the most profitable airlines operate as highly integrated, technology-enabled ecosystems rather than as fragmented departments. Operations, finance, fleet management, route planning, engineering, marketing, and customer service are closely coordinated, sharing real-time data to maximise efficiency, safety, and profitability.

The challenge for Sri Lankan Airlines is structural. Its operations are fragmented, overly hierarchical, and poorly aligned. Simply replacing the CEO or senior leadership will not address these deep-seated weaknesses. What the airline needs is a cohesive, integrated organisational ecosystem that leverages technology for cross-functional planning and real-time decision-making.

The government must urgently consider restructuring Sri Lankan Airlines to encourage:

=Joint planning across operational divisions

=Data-driven, evidence-based decision-making

=Continuous cross-functional consultation

=Collaborative strategic decisions on route rationalisation, fleet renewal, partnerships, and cost management, rather than exclusive top-down mandates

Sustainable reform requires systemic change. Without modernised organisational structures, stronger accountability, and aligned incentives across divisions, financial recovery will remain out of reach. An integrated, performance-oriented model offers the most realistic path to operational efficiency and long-term viability.

Reforming loss-making institutions like Sri Lankan Airlines is not merely a matter of leadership change — it is a structural overhaul essential to ensuring these entities contribute productively to the national economy rather than remain perpetual burdens.

By Chula Goonasekera – Citizen Analyst

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Features

Why Pi Day?

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15 hours ago

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2026/03/13

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International Day of Mathematics falls tomorrow

The approximate value of Pi (π) is 3.14 in mathematics. Therefore, the day 14 March is celebrated as the Pi Day. In 2019, UNESCO proclaimed 14 March as the International Day of Mathematics.

Ancient Babylonians and Egyptians figured out that the circumference of a circle is slightly more than three times its diameter. But they could not come up with an exact value for this ratio although they knew that it is a constant. This constant was later named as π which is a letter in the Greek alphabet.

Archimedes

It was the Greek mathematician Archimedes (250 BC) who was able to find an upper bound and a lower bound for this constant. He drew a circle of diameter one unit and drew hexagons inside and outside the circle such that the sides of each hexagon touch the sides of the circle. In mathematics the circle passing through all vertices of a polygon is called a ‘circumcircle’ and the largest circle that fits inside a polygon tangent to all its sides is called an ‘incircle’. The total length of the smaller hexagon then becomes the lower bound of π and the length of the hexagon outside the circle is the upper bound. He realised that by increasing the number of sides of the polygon can make the bounds get closer to the value of Pi and increased the number of sides to 12,24,48 and 60. He argued that by increasing the number of sides will ultimately result in obtaining the original circle, thereby laying the foundation for the theory of limits. He ended up with the lower bound as 22/7 and the upper bound 223/71. He could not continue his research as his hometown Syracuse was invaded by Romans and was killed by one of the soldiers. His last words were ‘do not disturb my circles’, perhaps a reference to his continuing efforts to find the value of π to a greater accuracy.

Archimedes can be considered as the father of geometry. His contributions revolutionised geometry and his methods anticipated integral calculus. He invented the pulley and the hydraulic screw for drawing water from a well. He also discovered the law of hydrostatics. He formulated the law of levers which states that a smaller weight placed farther from a pivot can balance a much heavier weight closer to it. He famously said “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I will move the earth”.

Mathematicians have found many expressions for π as a sum of infinite series that converge to its value. One such famous series is the Leibniz Series found in 1674 by the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, which is given below.

π = 4 ( 1 – 1/3 + 1/5 – 1/7 + 1/9 – ………….)

The Indian mathematical genius Ramanujan came up with a magnificent formula in 1910. The short form of the formula is as follows.

π = 9801/(1103 √8)

For practical applications an approximation is sufficient. Even NASA uses only the approximation 3.141592653589793 for its interplanetary navigation calculations.

It is not just an interesting and curious number. It is used for calculations in navigation, encryption, space exploration, video game development and even in medicine. As π is fundamental to spherical geometry, it is at the heart of positioning systems in GPS navigations. It also contributes significantly to cybersecurity. As it is an irrational number it is an excellent foundation for generating randomness required in encryption and securing communications. In the medical field, it helps to calculate blood flow rates and pressure differentials. In diagnostic tools such as CT scans and MRI, pi is an important component in mathematical algorithms and signal processing techniques.

This elegant, never-ending number demonstrates how mathematics transforms into practical applications that shape our world. The possibilities of what it can do are infinite as the number itself. It has become a symbol of beauty and complexity in mathematics. “It matters little who first arrives at an idea, rather what is significant is how far that idea can go.” said Sophie Germain.

Mathematics fans are intrigued by this irrational number and attempt to calculate it as far as they can. In March 2022, Emma Haruka Iwao of Japan calculated it to 100 trillion decimal places in Google Cloud. It had taken 157 days. The Guinness World Record for reciting the number from memory is held by Rajveer Meena of India for 70000 decimal places over 10 hours.

Happy Pi Day!

The author is a senior examiner of the International Baccalaureate in the UK and an educational consultant at the Overseas School of Colombo.

by R N A de Silva

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Features

Sheer rise of Realpolitik making the world see the brink

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2 days ago

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2026/03/12

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A combined US-Israel attack on Iran.(BBC)

The recent humanly costly torpedoing of an Iranian naval vessel in Sri Lanka’s Exclusive Economic Zone by a US submarine has raised a number of issues of great importance to international political discourse and law that call for elucidation. It is best that enlightened commentary is brought to bear in such discussions because at present misleading and uninformed speculation on questions arising from the incident are being aired by particularly jingoistic politicians of Sri Lanka’s South which could prove deleterious.

As matters stand, there seems to be no credible evidence that the Indian state was aware of the impending torpedoing of the Iranian vessel but these acerbic-tongued politicians of Sri Lanka’s South would have the local public believe that the tragedy was triggered with India’s connivance. Likewise, India is accused of ‘embroiling’ Sri Lanka in the incident on account of seemingly having prior knowledge of it and not warning Sri Lanka about the impending disaster.

It is plain that a process is once again afoot to raise anti-India hysteria in Sri Lanka. An obligation is cast on the Sri Lankan government to ensure that incendiary speculation of the above kind is defeated and India-Sri Lanka relations are prevented from being in any way harmed. Proactive measures are needed by the Sri Lankan government and well meaning quarters to ensure that public discourse in such matters have a factual and rational basis. ‘Knowledge gaps’ could prove hazardous.

Meanwhile, there could be no doubt that Sri Lanka’s sovereignty was violated by the US because the sinking of the Iranian vessel took place in Sri Lanka’s Exclusive Economic Zone. While there is no international decrying of the incident, and this is to be regretted, Sri Lanka’s helplessness and small player status would enable the US to ‘get away with it’.

Could anything be done by the international community to hold the US to account over the act of lawlessness in question? None is the answer at present. This is because in the current ‘Global Disorder’ major powers could commit the gravest international irregularities with impunity. As the threadbare cliché declares, ‘Might is Right’….. or so it seems.

Unfortunately, the UN could only merely verbally denounce any violations of International Law by the world’s foremost powers. It cannot use countervailing force against violators of the law, for example, on account of the divided nature of the UN Security Council, whose permanent members have shown incapability of seeing eye-to-eye on grave matters relating to International Law and order over the decades.

The foregoing considerations could force the conclusion on uncritical sections that Political Realism or Realpolitik has won out in the end. A basic premise of the school of thought known as Political Realism is that power or force wielded by states and international actors determine the shape, direction and substance of international relations. This school stands in marked contrast to political idealists who essentially proclaim that moral norms and values determine the nature of local and international politics.

While, British political scientist Thomas Hobbes, for instance, was a proponent of Political Realism, political idealism has its roots in the teachings of Socrates, Plato and latterly Friedrich Hegel of Germany, to name just few such notables.

On the face of it, therefore, there is no getting way from the conclusion that coercive force is the deciding factor in international politics. If this were not so, US President Donald Trump in collaboration with Israeli Rightist Premier Benjamin Natanyahu could not have wielded the ‘big stick’, so to speak, on Iran, killed its Supreme Head of State, terrorized the Iranian public and gone ‘scot-free’. That is, currently, the US’ impunity seems to be limitless.

Moreover, the evidence is that the Western bloc is reuniting in the face of Iran’s threats to stymie the flow of oil from West Asia to the rest of the world. The recent G7 summit witnessed a coming together of the foremost powers of the global North to ensure that the West does not suffer grave negative consequences from any future blocking of western oil supplies.

Meanwhile, Israel is having a ‘free run’ of the Middle East, so to speak, picking out perceived adversarial powers, such as Lebanon, and militarily neutralizing them; once again with impunity. On the other hand, Iran has been bringing under assault, with no questions asked, Gulf states that are seen as allying with the US and Israel. West Asia is facing a compounded crisis and International Law seems to be helplessly silent.

Wittingly or unwittingly, matters at the heart of International Law and peace are being obfuscated by some pro-Trump administration commentators meanwhile. For example, retired US Navy Captain Brent Sadler has cited Article 51 of the UN Charter, which provides for the right to self or collective self-defence of UN member states in the face of armed attacks, as justifying the US sinking of the Iranian vessel (See page 2 of The Island of March 10, 2026). But the Article makes it clear that such measures could be resorted to by UN members only ‘ if an armed attack occurs’ against them and under no other circumstances. But no such thing happened in the incident in question and the US acted under a sheer threat perception.

Clearly, the US has violated the Article through its action and has once again demonstrated its tendency to arbitrarily use military might. The general drift of Sadler’s thinking is that in the face of pressing national priorities, obligations of a state under International Law could be side-stepped. This is a sure recipe for international anarchy because in such a policy environment states could pursue their national interests, irrespective of their merits, disregarding in the process their obligations towards the international community.

Moreover, Article 51 repeatedly reiterates the authority of the UN Security Council and the obligation of those states that act in self-defence to report to the Council and be guided by it. Sadler, therefore, could be said to have cited the Article very selectively, whereas, right along member states’ commitments to the UNSC are stressed.

However, it is beyond doubt that international anarchy has strengthened its grip over the world. While the US set destabilizing precedents after the crumbling of the Cold War that paved the way for the current anarchic situation, Russia further aggravated these degenerative trends through its invasion of Ukraine. Stepping back from anarchy has thus emerged as the prime challenge for the world community.

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