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Scientology, Lexicography, and Legitimacy
Imagine that you work for an organization whose public image is somewhat tarnished, if not actually blackened. Your job is to restore (or establish) your organization’s standing in the public mind. How might you go about doing that?
If your organization is the Church or Scientology or one of the several entities it has spawned, you reach out to the small and friendly world of lexicography: the people who write dictionaries. You do this repeatedly, for reasons that are never entirely clear, but perhaps it is in order to attract the imprimatur of the ordinary to your organization’s activities. Dictionaries and the people who write them are ordinary and mainstream. We are regarded as friendly, non-partisan, helpful, and authoritative only in the small area of human intercourse that is our expertise: words, what they mean, and how they are used. No one is ever going to criticize you for having a lexicographer on your team.
That, at any rate, is what I think is going on, though I stand ready to be better informed about the subject than I am currently, because after more than ten years of being on the receiving end of such outreach from the Church of Scientology, I still don’t get it.
Some history first: I have been writing dictionary definitions and doing other related dictionary-making tasks for more than 25 years. I have…
