Throwback Thursday: In 1977, Smithsonian Creates Obscure Dictionary
In April 1977, Sen. William Proxmire gave The Smithsonian Institution a Golden Fleece Award for spending $89,000 — $435,124 in 2022 dollars — to create a dictionary of Tzotzil, an obscure and unwritten Mayan language spoken by a few hundred thousand people in southern Mexico.
Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, gave awards for wasteful and nonsensical spending, eventually handing out 168 Golden Fleece Awards between 1975 and 1988.
Even worse, the dictionary recorded the specific dialect only spoken by about 10,000 people, providing very limited usefulness, Proxmire said.
“To top it off, there are no Spanish definitions in the dictionary and thus, as acknowledged in the volume’s introduction, it is essentially useless to even this tiny band of peasants,” the senator said at the time. “All this adds up to spending the taxpayer’s money in a way that doesn’t make sense in any language.”
The person who compiled the dictionary said it was “soon to collect dust on library shelves.”
Proxmire said, “That helps me make my final point. I am not saying the dictionary is useless or without merit. But we must have a set of priorities when it comes to spending public funds.”
This came on the heals of The Smithsonian being criticized by the General Accounting Office for creating two private corporations “to convert millions of the taxpayers’ dollars into ‘private money,’ which it then allegedly spends outside the reach of federal restrictions,” Proxmire said.
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