In October, a dictionary changed its listed definition of “sexual preference” overnight after then-appointee to the Supreme Court Amy Coney Barrett had used it in the Senate and been smeared as using an “anti-gay dog whistle.” As I wrote in these pages, it might not be the best term, but it was absurd to call it a slur, much less for a dictionary to try quietly to officialize it as one without notice.
I had hoped this was a one-off. But it has happened again. Whether it is wise, civically healthy, or fair and justified for Democrats to pack the Supreme Court if given the chance, I will not go into here. Whatever it is, it’s not a verbal issue. But what is a words issue is that as Democratic activists are trying to push court packing, they are being backed by a dictionary.
On Nov. 1, as the writer J.D. Graham has pointed out, Dictionary.com listed the following definition for “court packing”: “U.S. History. an unsuccessful attempt by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937 to appoint up to six additional justices to the Supreme Court, which had invalidated a number of his New Deal laws.”
As of the beginning of December, this descriptive definition has been moved down to the No. 2 spot. The top definition is now “the practice of changing the number or composition of judges on a court, making it more favorable to particular goals or ideologies, and typically involving an increase in the number of seats on the court: Court packing can tip the balance of the Supreme Court toward the right or left.”
By this definition, any time a judge leaves a court and is not replaced immediately with an ideological clone, that’s court packing. Now, Dictionary.com may not have the august history of Merriam-Webster, but it has achieved a certain primacy online merely by winning an early internet race for a good URL. And while there are many dictionaries that operate on very different theories on what makes a given thing a legitimate definition of a word, what is going on here is illegitimate by any standard.
Whether you believe the role of the dictionary is to prescribe the proper way to use words to users of the language or, rather, merely to observe and describe how users of the language employ words tends to divide people on their theory of how dictionaries should operate. Yet, that isn’t the issue here. This definition codifies a temporary, exigent bit of political spin as the meaning of the word. Nobody really thinks President Barack Obama was “court packing” when he nominated Elena Kagan or that legal analysts who observed that Merrick Garland was a “less ideological” or “compromise pick” by Obama means that pick was, er, less court-packish.
That Sen. Lindsey Graham is hypocritical does not put this in dispute. It is not in dispute that court packing means adding seats to the bench to serve a political agenda. Heck, even FDR agrees. When he suggested adding justices, he understood that what he was trying to do would be wrong to admit. He argued with a sinister wink that he was merely doing it because the Supreme Court needed more people to keep up with all its work. Dictionary.com could learn some history and, at the very least, refuse to admit it is being activist, too.
