2022: the highs, the lows and the same-old-same-old

2022 was a year when I didn’t do much blogging. That wasn’t because there was nothing to blog about, but more because I had too much other stuff going on. So, as it’s now end-of-year review season, here’s a round-up of some of the events, debates and news stories that caught my attention during the last twelve months.  

In January the Scottish government agreed to pardon those Scots–most of them women–who had been executed for witchcraft several centuries earlier. Some felt this was just a PR exercise, designed to burnish Scotland’s progressive credentials, but it did raise some questions worth reflecting on about how we memorialize past misogyny and whether that makes any difference in the present.

The same can’t be said about the real PR story of the month, an announcement from Mars (the chocolate manufacturer, not the planet): that the characters used to promote M&Ms were getting a makeover which would highlight “their personalities rather than their gender”. What this turned out to mean was replacing one set of gender stereotypes with a different set. The green M&M, for instance, was previously supposed to be the sexy one, but in the revamp she has exchanged her white go-go boots for “cool, laid-back sneakers” to symbolize her “confidence and empowerment, as a strong female”. She will also lose her previous habit of being bitchy to the brown M&M (who is also female, and has also been given new shoes with a lower heel): we’ll see them “together throwing shine rather than shade”. As you’ll have gathered from these quotes, the press release was like a digest of popular neoliberal feminist clichés. But it’s pointless to expect mass-market advertising not to deal in clichés. What’s interesting about this story (like the previous year’s story about the rebranding of Mr Potato Head as “Potato Head”) is what it says about changing fashions in gender stereotyping and gendered language.

Fast forward to April, which was a month of Men in (British) politics Behaving Badly. Actually that was pretty much true for every month of the year, but in April things got particularly bad. There was, for instance, the MP who was seen looking at porn in the House of Commons debating chamber, and who claimed to have landed accidentally on a porn site when he was looking for information about tractors (this understandably convinced nobody, and in the end he resigned). There was also a story in the Mail on Sunday which accused the Labour Deputy Leader Angela Rayner of crossing and uncrossing her legs to distract Boris Johnson during Prime Minister’s Questions. Rayner’s description of this as a “perverted, desperate smear” (though there were some indications that she might unwittingly have inspired the story herself during a bit of casual banter on the House of Commons terrace) brought forth a torrent of misogynist, classist commentary which illustrated exactly why British Parliamentary politics is so offputting to so many women.

June brought the news (not unexpected but still horrendous) that the US Supreme Court had upheld a challenge to its earlier ruling in Roe v. Wade, enabling a large number of states to prohibit abortion completely. If ever there was a moment for deeds not words, and for unity rather than factionalism among supporters of women’s reproductive rights (whatever else they might disagree on), this was surely it; and yet one highly visible response to the crisis involved feminists performatively scolding other feminists online for using “problematic” terms, slogans and symbols. For me this was something of a low point. As much as I believe that language matters, I don’t believe linguistic purism and language policing have ever advanced the feminist cause.

In July the England women’s football team won the European Championship, a feat which has eluded the men’s team, and I started getting inquiries from journalists about their name. One inquirer asked why, if we’re not allowed to call women actresses any more, it’s fine for England’s women footballers to be known as Lionesses. What is the deal with –ess? Good question. Actress is actually a complicated case: unlike, say, authoress and poetess it survived the purge of feminine-marked occupational titles in the 1970s, but some women did reject it, and what has developed since is a kind of status distinction between female actors and actresses (referring to a woman as an actor implies she’s a serious artist rather than, say, a popular soap star). But the more recent acceptance of Lioness as a label for elite footballers suggests that the old feminist view of –ess terms as twee and trivializing may have gone. Perhaps it helps if you know that in the animal world it’s lionesses who rule: they run the pride and do most of the hunting (forget The Lion King, it’s bullshit). But it’s still slightly odd, because if the women are the Lionesses that implies that the men must be the Lions, and in fact you don’t often hear them called that: more typically they’re just “England”. On the more positive side, though, pundits who used to talk about “football” and “women’s football” are now being more careful to say “men’s football”.

During July and August we had to watch the Tories choosing a replacement for Boris Johnson, who had finally been forced to resign as Prime Minister. The man who eventually replaced him, Rishi Sunak (let’s draw a veil over the short, unhappy premiership of Liz Truss) favours a less feral brand of masculinity, but his Modern Man credentials still leave something to be desired. In August he responded to a question about what sacrifices he’d had to make to become a prime ministerial contender by saying he’d been “an absolutely appalling husband and father for the last couple of years”. This is a variation on the humblebrag answer to the job interview question “what would you say is your biggest weakness?”–“I’m a bit of a perfectionist/a workaholic”. Presumably it was meant to make Sunak sound reassuringly dedicated to the job but not unaware of his domestic obligations or devoid of human feelings (“of course I love my family, but running the country has to come first”). But in fact it just sounded smug and sexist. If a woman in Sunak’s position described herself as “an appalling wife and mother” she’d be criticized for her negligence, not applauded for her self-awareness.

In September Queen Elizabeth II died, and was posthumously recast as a feminist role-model by commentators around the world. A bit like the green M&M, the late monarch had apparently been a “strong, empowered female” who “paved the way for other women to dedicate themselves fully to their careers”. The fact that, as a Queen Regnant, she was not so much a girlboss as an anomaly within an anachronism, seemed to escape those who churned out this vacuous fluff.   

October brought, as it does in most years, a brief and ineffectual flurry of concern about the extent of sexual harassment and violence in British schools. Among the 3000 girls and young women who participated in Girlguiding UK’s annual survey, around 20 percent reported that they didn’t feel safe in school. The figures for reported rapes and sexual assaults in schools suggest that these anxieties are not unjustified. But most of the harassment girls experience in school is language and communication-based, which is why I’ve blogged about this issue on several previous occasions. It’s another case where words are no substitute for deeds: we’ve had a steady stream of reports and surveys which all say the same thing, and absolutely no concerted action to address the problem on the ground.

In November the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, met her Finnish counterpart Sanna Marin—an unremarkable enough event, you might think, and certainly not one you’d expect to make headlines around the world, except that a reporter at their joint press conference asked what may have been the year’s stupidest sexist question. “A lot of people will be wondering”, he began, inaccurately, “are you two meeting just because you’re similar in age and got a lot of common stuff there?” Marin kept her answer simple: “We’re meeting”, she explained, “because we’re Prime Ministers”. Ardern on the other hand treated the questioner to a mini-lecture on trade relations, full of fascinating facts about what New Zealand buys from Finland (elevators) and what Finland buys from New Zealand (meat and wine). Points to both of them, but will the day ever come when women who run countries are not routinely patronized by media guys who make Alan Partridge look like an intellectual giant?  

In December it was reported that the Cambridge Dictionary, which is designed primarily for foreign learners of English, had updated its entries for woman and man by adding a new sense: “an adult who lives and identifies as female/male though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth”. I expected this to happen, and I expected it to cause controversy, but I didn’t feel moved to weigh in because my own view hasn’t changed since I wrote this post in 2019. It was unpopular then and will doubtless be even more unpopular now, but such is life.

December was also the month when the Taliban barred women from universities in Afghanistan, and when the equally fanatical misogynists who rule Iran cracked down hard on the protests which began in September following the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands if the morality police. It’s hard to feel sanguine about how this uprising will end. But nothing in 2022 was more inspiring than watching these brave and determined women–and the men who are protesting alongside them–shouting “Woman–life–freedom”. Those words cut through the noise and the bullshit: they speak to women everywhere.

So, that was 2022: thanks to everyone who read the few posts I managed to produce, and to all the writers and researchers whose work I drew on. And while I’m not expecting peace, joy and freedom to break out around the world in 2023, I’ll still wish you all the happiest possible new year.

‘Woman’: an update

Back in the summer of 2019, I wrote about a petition which called on Oxford University Press to change the Oxford dictionary entry for ‘woman’. It was started by Maria Beatrice Giovanardi after she googled the word ‘woman’ and was shocked by what her search returned—entries full of insulting synonyms (‘baggage’, ‘besom’, ‘bint’) and time-warped example sentences like ‘Ms September will embody the professional, intelligent yet sexy career woman’. Oxford wasn’t the only offender, but its market position and reputation made it a prime target for Giovanardi’s campaign. Her petition attracted media attention, and ultimately over 30,000 signatures. Oxford announced that it was undertaking a review. And earlier this month, the first results were unveiled.

Here’s what you get if you google ‘woman’ now:  

Woman /ˈwʊmən/ noun

noun: woman; plural noun: women

1. an adult female human being. “a drawing of a young woman”

Similar: lady, adult female, female, girl, person, lass, lassie, wife, colleen, Frau, Signora, Señora, the female of the species, member of the fair sex, member of the fairer sex, bird, gal, Jane, sister, Sheila, femme, Judy, dame, broad, frail, maid, maiden, damsel, demoiselle, gentlewoman, bint, mare, [offensive] bitch

• a female member of a workforce, team, etc. “thousands of women were laid off”
• a female person associated with a particular place, activity, or occupation “she was the first Oxford woman to take a first in Physics”
• a disrespectful form of address to a woman “don’t be daft, woman!”
• DATED  a female person who is paid to clean someone’s house and carry out other domestic duties “a daily woman”
• a person’s wife, girlfriend, or female lover. “he wondered whether Billy had his woman with him”

Similar: girlfriend, girl, partner, significant other,  wife, spouse, consort, fiancée, lover, mistress, sweetheart, inamorata, better half, other half, baby, Mrs, old lady, gf, missus, bird, her indoors, mot, dona, bibi, querida, lady friend, lady love, young lady, lady, lady wife, old dutch, squeeze, patootie, leman, doxy, paramour

• a person with the qualities traditionally associated with females. “I feel more of a woman by empowering myself to do what is right for me”
• a female individual; one “with that money, a woman could buy a house and put two kids through college”

First, a pedantic point: though many headlines said Oxford had ‘changed the definition of woman’, in fact the definition has not changed: it’s still ‘adult female human being’. What’s changed is some of the other stuff that appears in a dictionary entry. The list of synonyms no longer includes some of the archaic and little-used terms from the previous version (e.g. ‘besom’, ‘wench’); it does still contain some insulting items, on the grounds that they remain in common use, but notes have been added explaining that ‘bitch’, for example, is ‘offensive’. Some more specialised senses of ‘woman’ get similar warning labels. ‘Woman’ as a vocative (as in ‘don’t be daft, woman!’) is ‘disrespectful’, and ‘woman’ in the sense of ‘maid/cleaner’ is ‘dated’.

The old example sentences have been ditched; the new ones depict women in what Oxford calls an ‘active and positive’ way, getting first class degrees in physics, empowering themselves and putting their children through college. Even the less upbeat ‘thousands of women were laid off’ is an implicit reminder of women’s presence in the paid workforce. I’ll confess to finding this a bit heavy-handed, as though the entry-writer had decided to atone for the casual sexism of the past by choosing only examples with an Uplifting Feminist Message. But that’s a minor quibble: the new examples do a decent job of illustrating the usages they’ve been chosen to exemplify.    

For most media commentators, however, the most newsworthy aspect of the revision was not the culling of archaic synonyms or the use of examples showing women in a positive light. What really caught their attention was the shift to LGBT-inclusive language in ‘a person’s wife, girlfriend or female lover’. Pink News, unsurprisingly, led on this change—but so did many mainstream publications which are not exactly known for their cutting-edge sexual politics. The Daily Mail, for instance, ran a report headed ‘Oxford English Dictionary updates entry for “woman” so that it is now defined as a “person’s” wife, girlfriend or lover as opposed to a man’s after gender review’, and went on to note that the entry for ‘man’ has had a parallel makeover: it ‘now reads as “a person’s husband, boyfriend or male lover”’.   

These updates were undoubtedly needed. We’ve been referring to same-sex partners as ‘wives/husbands’ for several years now, and same-sex uses of ‘boyfriend/girlfriend/lover’ go back much further. But the issue being addressed by the substitution of ‘person’ for ‘man/woman’ is not sexism but heterosexism. The commentators who hailed it as a breakthrough seem not to have noticed that it’s an isolated and largely token gesture: the rest of this section, beginning with the example sentence ‘he wondered whether Billy had his woman with him’ and continuing with a list of synonyms which includes ‘her indoors’, ‘doxy’ and ‘patootie’, is still entirely patriarchal and heteronormative.

Some readers did notice this, and were evidently confused by it: their comments on the Mail story included ‘People in general are definitively much more than just the roles they fill in others’ lives’, and ‘So a woman is not an individual person but belong[s] to somebody else?’ This criticism does not reflect the overall emphasis of the entry, where ‘a person’s wife, girlfriend or female lover’ is only one of several senses listed. But it does reflect the emphasis the media gave to the LGBT inclusion angle, which led some readers to conclude that ‘wife, girlfriend or female lover’ was now the primary definition of ‘woman’, and to wonder–not unreasonably–why that was supposed to be progress.   

Though the petition focused specifically on the ‘woman’ entry, Oxford’s review did not stop there. Revisions have also been made to other entries which were thought to pose similar problems. Many news reports mentioned two of these: ‘housework’, where the example ‘she still does all the housework’ has been replaced by ‘I was busy doing housework when the doorbell rang’, and ‘high-maintenance’, where the sentence ‘if Martin could keep a high-maintenance girl like Tania happy, he must be doing something right’ has been replaced by ‘I freely admit to being high-maintenance’.   

These substitutions, while unobjectionable, show the limitations of an approach which tackles stereotyping by simply replacing sex-specific examples with gender-neutral/inclusive ones. When you read ‘I freely admit to being high-maintenance’, who do you imagine as the ‘I’? In many cases we would tend to imagine a gender-unspecified person as male by default, but in this case I’m betting that most readers will picture a woman. Part of what English-speakers know about the expression ‘high-maintenance’ is that when it’s used to describe a person, that person is likely to be female (I did a quick corpus search to check, and found that references to ‘high-maintenance’ women were over three times more frequent than similar references to men). If you want to block that association, you probably need to pick an explicitly male-referring example. A gender-neutral one avoids overt stereotyping, but it doesn’t prevent the covert stereotyping that results from readers interpreting ‘I’ in relation to their pre-existing cultural and linguistic knowledge.

But in any case there’s a question about whether a descriptive dictionary, one whose aim is to document, as OUP’s press statement put it, ‘how real people use English in their daily lives’, should be trying to block associations which are part of our knowledge about words. It’s one thing if the sexism is gratuitous—if a sexist example has been selected for no good reason (as appears to have been the case with Oxford’s use of ‘a rabid feminist’ to illustrate ‘rabid’, which was criticised on social media a few years ago); but if there’s evidence that ‘high-maintenance’ really is used more frequently about women, should that not be reflected in the entry for it? Should dictionaries be trying to present us with a less biased world than the one we currently inhabit—or is their real obligation to reflect the world as it is, and as it shapes our use of words?

For the makers of dictionaries this is a perennial, and genuinely difficult, question. They may say that their decisions are ‘driven solely by evidence about how real people use English in their daily lives’, but ‘solely’ is an overstatement: they also have to consider what real people want from, and find acceptable in, their products. Sensitivities change over time—in the past many controversies turned on matters of taste and decency, whereas today there is more concern about diversity and bias—but what doesn’t change is the existence of competing pressures, and the difficulty of finding a balance between them.  

Has Oxford found the right balance? Maria Beatrice Giovanardi told reporters that while she is mostly happy with the revisions, she’s disappointed by the retention of ‘bitch’, and will continue to press for its removal. I think she’s got a point: while I don’t believe offensive epithets should be airbrushed out of dictionaries, I do struggle with the logic of putting ‘bitch’ on a list of synonyms for ‘woman’.

To see what I’m getting at, let’s take a look at the list of synonyms in the ‘man’ entry:

male, gentleman, guy, fellow, gent, mother’s son, bloke, chap, geezer, lad, Joe, dude, bro, hombre, digger, oke, ou, oom, bodach, cove, carl.

Essentially this is a list of stylistic and/or regional variants meaning ‘man’, or in a couple of cases ‘old man’. The corresponding list in the ‘woman’ entry (see above) also includes informal and regional variants (e.g. ‘girl/gal’, ‘lassie’, ‘colleen’, ‘Sheila’), but in addition it features two sets of words which have no parallel on the ‘man’ list: archaic courtly terms (‘maiden’, ‘damsel/demoiselle’, ‘member of the fair(er) sex’) and belittling or dehumanising insults (‘bint’, ‘bird’, ‘bitch’, ‘mare’–though not ‘cunt’, which suggests that evidence-based decision-making does have limits).

This is what I meant when I used the word ‘logic’: it’s not just that the two lists contain different words (which you’d obviously expect), it’s that they seem to have been compiled on different principles. That can’t be because there are no comparable words for men. If you’re going to count ‘bitch’ and ‘mare’ as synonyms for ‘woman’, you could equally count ‘stallion’, ‘cock’ and ‘stag’ as synonyms for ‘man’. True, they’re not exact equivalents (the difference reflects our culture’s more negative attitude to female sexuality), but if it’s relevant to include words from this general category in the ‘woman’ entry, why not do the same for ‘man’? If the casually contemptuous ‘bint’ belongs on one list, why doesn’t the other include, say, ‘git’ or ‘bastard’? If ‘damsel’, why not ‘knight’?

I’m not seriously suggesting that these terms should be added to the ‘man’ entry. The serious question is why flowery euphemisms and insults are deemed essential for our understanding of ‘woman’, whereas ‘man’ requires no such elaboration. I’m inclined to see this asymmetry as a hangover from the long history of treating ‘woman’ as man’s ‘Other’, and representing her from men’s perspective. Just removing ‘bitch’ would not resolve this deeper problem–but I do think it needs to be acknowledged and addressed.

So, from me as from Maria Beatrice Giovanardi, it’s two cheers for Oxford’s revisions. Heartfelt cheers in my case, though, because I don’t think we should underestimate either the magnitude or the difficulty of the task they’ve taken on. It’s a lot easier to criticise a dictionary than it is to make one.          

Dictionary wars

As I had failed in my efforts to think without recourse to language, I assumed that this was an exact equivalent of reality; I was encouraged in this misconception by the grown-ups, whom I took to be the sole depositories of absolute truth: when they defined a thing, they expressed its substance, in the sense in which one expresses the juice from a fruit

—Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

Back in July, I posted about a petition calling on Oxford University Press to change the archaic and sexist entry for ‘woman’ in one of its most widely-used dictionaries, the Oxford Dictionary (the one you get with an iPhone). A few weeks later, in August, OUP’s blog published a response to the petition from Katherine Connor Martin, whose job title is ‘head of lexical content strategy’. This response made some of the same points I had: since language reflects the culture in which it is used, a certain amount of sexism is inevitable—you can’t eliminate all bias without compromising the aim of a modern dictionary, which is to describe the way words are actually used. Martin did, however, assure readers that OUP takes their concerns very seriously, and said the dictionary’s editors were investigating ‘whether there are senses of “woman” that are not currently covered, but should be added in a future update’.

At the time this response attracted little attention. But then this week, the petition was suddenly news again. There was a spate of press reports claiming, in effect, that because of the petition, which has now attracted 30,000 signatures, OUP was going to redefine the word ‘woman’. One report, in the Bookseller, misleadingly referred to the petition as ‘an online survey’, as if Oxford had commissioned an opinion poll and was proposing to change the meaning of a word on that basis. And at that point things really kicked off: Twitter was all over it, and by Thursday the debate had even been covered by Good Morning America.

In fact, nothing Katherine Connor Martin had said the press might do–like adding new senses to the entry, or marking some synonyms for ‘woman’ more clearly as offensive–would amount to ‘redefining’ the word ‘woman’. More fundamentally, you can’t change the meaning of a word like ‘woman’ simply by altering a dictionary entry. If OUP decided to redefine ‘woman’ as ‘a mythical white equine mammal with a single horn’, it would make no difference at all to the way English speakers actually use it. It would just make the dictionary look like (if you’ll forgive the mixing of equine species) an ass. No one checks the dictionary entry for ‘woman’ before they utter a sentence containing the word: we don’t need anyone’s permission to use words to mean what we already know they mean. Dictionary-makers spend a lot of their time and energy systematically investigating what we think words mean, as evidenced by the way we use them, so they can document that fully and accurately. They take their cue from us, not vice-versa.

But most people really don’t understand that, as I found out when I waded into the debate on Twitter. The Guardian’s report had mentioned one suggestion made in the petition—though in that context it was a minor point, almost an afterthought—that the example sentences in the ‘woman’ entry might include references to different kinds of women, like ‘a trans woman, a lesbian woman, etc.’ It then quoted Katherine Connor Martin’s point about ‘senses of “woman”…that should be added in a future update’. This juxtaposition led some Guardian-reading Twitter-users to infer that OUP was planning to update the entry to include, specifically, references to trans women. And the press was then accused of caving to political pressure from the trans lobby to redefine what ‘woman’ means.

I thought that was a stretch, and I said so. Not because there hasn’t been lobbying on this issue—there has, from both sides—but I don’t think this petition is an example of it. (Its central concern is sexism rather than gender identity, and its creator is a feminist, not a trans activist.) I also don’t think that the press has ‘caved’ to any kind of pressure, except possibly the pressure to move the ‘woman’ question higher up its agenda. In the age of the internet, dictionaries, like other commercial enterprises, do feel an obligation to appear responsive to users’ concerns, so a petition with 30,000 signatures may have some influence on their order of priorities. Beyond that, I see no evidence of ‘caving’: far more has been read into Katherine Connor Martin’s comments than they actually say.

But as the discussion on Twitter progressed, I began to realise that the reason so many people believed or suspected things I found implausible or even absurd was because they saw dictionaries in a particular way—one which is at odds with the way dictionaries see themselves, and the way I, as a semi-insider, see them (I’m a linguist not a lexicographer, but I know how modern lexicography is done). Based on my conversations with people on Twitter over the last few days, some widely-held beliefs about dictionaries include the following.

The makers of dictionaries have absolute power to decide what words really mean, and they use that power selectively.

Some people I interacted with evidently imagined the editorial process at a dictionary as rather like what you see in movies or TV shows about journalism: people sitting in a meeting arguing the toss about definitions and debating whether to accept or reject new words and senses of words. (‘Does this deserve to be in the dictionary, or should is it too illogical, confusing and objectionable to make the cut?’) This may help to explain why there’s concern about the potential for political lobbying to influence definitions, just as people worry about, say, who might be putting pressure on the BBC to take a certain editorial line on Brexit.

Concern about dictionaries pushing, or being persuaded to push, a covert political agenda is reinforced by a second widely-held belief, that

The decision to include a word or sense in a dictionary is effectively an endorsement of that word or sense. It communicates that the word or sense is real, correct and should be used by everyone.

Another dictionary-related news story this week reported that ‘non-binary “they”’ (i.e., the pronoun ‘they’ used in reference to a specific individual who identifies as neither male nor female) had just been added to a leading US dictionary, Merriam-Webster. For some of my interlocutors on Twitter, this decision implied not, ‘we have looked at the evidence and found this use of “they” is now mainstream enough to be recorded in a dictionary entry describing the current usage of “they”’, but something more like, ‘we thoroughly approve of this new way of using pronouns, and we want to support non-binary people by telling everyone to adopt it’. The news reports themselves took a similar view, in some cases describing the decision as ‘validation for nonbinary people’. That only reinforced some people’s suspicion that the decision must have been prompted by lobbying.

When people expressed the view that dictionaries shouldn’t be entertaining politically partisan demands to change their entries, I pointed out that their own demand for no change was also politically partisan. But some of their replies invoked another belief which shows what’s ultimately at stake in arguments like the one about ‘woman’:

Dictionaries don’t just define words; since words (or a lot of words) name things in the world, the word-meanings that appear in dictionary entries are also definitions of reality itself.

For people who hold this belief, there is essentially no difference between asking ‘what does the word “woman” mean?’ and asking ‘what, in reality, is a woman?’ It follows that changing the definition of a word means changing what will count as reality, and in some cases that’s seen as a politically-motivated, quasi-Orwellian assault on the truth.

One of my interlocutors on Twitter explained this to me using a hypothetical question:

if some people started to demand we use the word ‘night’ to mean ‘day’ …would the dictionary record that use?

I think this person expected the answer to be ‘no, of course not, that would be absurd: “night” and “day” are antonyms in language because they’re opposites in nature’. But in fact the answer is ‘yes’: if the evidence showed that a significant section of the linguistic community was using ‘night’ to mean ‘day’, then that sense would be recorded in entries for ‘night’ (alongside the original sense, not instead of it). This is exactly what many dictionaries have done with the word ‘literally’, which, notoriously, is used very frequently as an intensifier with the opposite meaning, ‘figuratively’ or ‘metaphorically’ (as in Taylor Swift’s recent statement that ‘I’m literally breaking’, though as far as I know she remains physically intact). This ‘incorrect’ and much-criticised usage of ‘literally’ is so common, it would be hard for a dictionary whose aim is to document the actual use of words to leave it out.

For dictionaries (and linguists like me), the question ‘what does this word mean’ is an empirical question, reflecting the axiom that ‘the meaning of a word is its use in the language’. You work out the meaning (or more often, meanings) of a word by collecting and organising evidence about its use by real speakers and writers in real contexts. There are no meetings where dictionary-makers compare their intuitions about the meaning of ‘woman’, or ‘they’, and debate whether a new sense is ‘good enough’ to deserve ‘endorsement’. What they’re looking for is evidence that the new sense is sufficiently well-established to be considered part of ‘general’ or ‘common’ usage. If it is, then it belongs in the dictionary. Not because the lexicographers think it’s a worthy addition, but simply because their aim is to provide a full and accurate record of usage. If enough speakers of the language have adopted a new word or meaning, descriptive accuracy requires it to be included.

So, what is the evidence that something is part of general usage? There’s probably some variation in the criteria different dictionaries use, and also in the criteria they apply to different kinds of words, but with something like non-binary ‘they’, which has been around for quite a while in certain subcultures (e.g., on college campuses and tumblr), Merriam-Webster’s decision that the time had come to add it was likely based on evidence that it’s now turning up regularly in mainstream sources targeting a general audience, like newspapers and general interest magazines. (In fact, it has recently been adopted as a norm in the style guides of several mainstream media organisations, so its frequency in their output will probably have increased.)

The source material dictionaries treat as evidence isn’t just selected and used in an ad hoc, unsystematic way. Today’s dictionary-makers rely on corpora, which are very large (millions or even billions of words), structured, taggable and searchable samples of authentic language-use. They’re constructed to cover a wide range of written and spoken genres and media, and to represent different sections of the language-using population (for English this may include writers/speakers in all the major world regions where the language is used). From a corpus you can collect not only a large number of authentic examples of a word’s use, but also quantitative data on how frequently it’s being used in particular ways, and whether these uses are common across contexts and populations or confined to specific regions, subcultures or genres. You can also monitor changes over time, tracking the spread of an innovation or the progress of a shift in meaning.

When Katherine Connor Martin says that editors are investigating ‘whether there are senses of “woman” not currently covered [that] should be included in future updates’, I’m guessing one thing that means is that they’ll be looking at recent corpus data to see what’s changed–if certain ways of using ‘woman’ have become more salient, or if they’ve moved, like ‘they’, from the subcultural margins to the mainstream. I’m confident the evidence will confirm that ‘adult female human’ is still the primary sense of ‘woman’ (and the commonest by a long way); the question is whether there will be a case for adding anything else.

For the dictionary-makers this is a question about the linguistic facts on the ground: it’s about how people are using the word ‘woman’, how frequently it’s being used in a particular way, and what range of contexts it’s appearing in. Even if they make a show of being responsive to concerns like the ones raised in the petition, they’re not going to ignore their own data on these points: their rigorous, evidence-based approach is, after all, what enables them to market their products as ‘authoritative’. However assiduously they’re lobbied, they’re unlikely to emulate Urban Dictionary by making popular opinion the measure of a definition’s value.

But whatever the linguistic evidence shows, it won’t answer the question at the heart of the Twitter spat, which is not an empirical question about the way words are used, but an ontological question about the nature of reality. Dictionaries cannot answer that kind of question, and it’s a mistake to think they can. They can only tell us (and only claim to be able to tell us) what the word ‘woman’ is currently used to mean. That will never settle the ongoing argument about what a woman is or is not.

Dissing the dictionary

This week the Guardian writer Emine Saner drew my attention to a petition on Change.org asking Oxford University Press, the publisher of the Oxford Dictionary, to change its entry for the word ‘woman’.

The petition condemns this entry as ‘unacceptable in today’s society’, noting that many of the synonyms it gives for ‘woman’ are derogatory, and the illustrative examples are variations on old sexist themes:

A ‘woman’ is subordinate to men. Example: ‘male fisherfolk who take their catch home for the little woman to gut’, ‘one of his sophisticated London women’.

A ‘woman’ is a sex object. Many definitions are about sex. Example: ‘Ms September will embody the professional, intelligent yet sexy career woman’, ‘If that does not work, they can become women of the streets.’

‘Woman’ is not equal to ‘man’. The definition of ‘man’ is much more exhaustive than that of ‘woman’. Example: Oxford Dictionary’s definition for ‘man’ includes 25 ‘phrases’ (examples), ‘woman’ includes only 5 ‘phrases’ (examples).

The creator of the petition, Maria Beatrice Giovanardi, has found that Oxford’s entry is not an isolated case. In a piece entitled ‘Have you ever Googled “woman”?’ she examines the entries in several widely-used dictionaries and points out similar problems with all of them. Her petition targets Oxford, however, because as well as being, in her view, the worst offender, it’s also got a market advantage: it’s the dictionary you get with Apple’s products and the one that pops up first in searches on Google, Yahoo and Bing.  Her petition calls on the Press

1. To eliminate all phrases and definitions that discriminate against and patronise women and/or connote men’s ownership of women;
2. to enlarge the definition of ‘woman’ and equal it to the definition of ‘man’;
3. to include examples representative of minorities, for example, a transgender woman, a lesbian woman, etc.

As I told Emine Saner (whose own piece you can read here), I’ve got mixed feelings about this campaign. I do think the entries Giovanardi reproduces are terrible, and I’ll come back to that later on. But the petition is based on ideas about dictionaries–how they’re made, what they aim to do, and how they’re used–which, to my mind, are also a problem. I’ve written about this before, but let’s just recap.

Modern dictionaries are descriptive: their purpose isn’t to tell people how words should be used, but rather to record how words actually are used by members of the relevant language community (or more exactly, in most cases, by ‘educated’ users of the standard written language). What’s in the Oxford Dictionary entry for ‘woman’ does not represent, as Giovanardi puts it, ‘what Oxford University Press thinks of women’. The dictionary is essentially a record of what the lexicographers have found out by analysing a large (nowadays, extremely large—we’re talking billions of words) corpus of authentic English texts, produced by many different writers over time.

I’m not trying to suggest that dictionaries compiled in this way are beyond criticism: they’re not, and that’s another point I’ll come back to. But a distinction needs to be made between the producers’ own biases and biases which are present in the source material they use as evidence. A lot of the sexism Giovanardi complains about is in the second category: it’s the result of recording patterns of usage that have evolved, and still persist, in a historically male-dominated and sexist culture.

For instance, one reason why the Oxford entry for ‘man’ is longer than the one for ‘woman’ is that men have been (and still are) treated as the human default. Men are both people and male people; women are only women. The historical reality of sexism also makes itself felt in the presence of so many degrading and dehumanizing terms on lists of synonyms for ‘woman’. These reflect the social fact that women have been sexually objectified in ways that men have not; they have also been treated, in life as well as language, as men’s appendages or possessions. It’s not even two centuries since that was their status in English law.

If the vocabulary of a language reflects its users’ cultural beliefs and preoccupations, then it’s no surprise that many English words and expressions denoting women highlight their dependence on and inferiority to men, their physical appearance and their sexual availability. (In an early feminist study of this phenomenon, the linguist Julia Penelope Stanley identified over 200 words for ‘woman’ that meant, or had come to mean, ‘prostitute’.)  It’s true dictionaries have a bias towards the usage of men from the most privileged social classes–the section of society that has historically had most access to the means of representation–but in this case it’s not obvious that a more balanced sample would paint a totally different picture. Sexism and misogyny have never been confined to a single class, or indeed a single sex.

The demand to eliminate ‘phrases and definitions that discriminate against or patronise women’ (or other subordinated groups: there have been similar campaigns in the past relating to entries where the issue was race, ethnicity or faith) implies that dictionaries should sanitise the reality of word-usage which is sexist, racist, anti-semitic or whatever, in the hope that this gesture will help to make a better world. Lexicographers tend to be wary of that suggestion, since it goes against their descriptivist principles. They also reject the popular belief that merely by including a certain word or definition they’re somehow endorsing it, giving it a degree of currency and acceptability which it would lack if it were not in the dictionary.

But while I agree this belief misunderstands the aims and methods of modern lexicography, I also think there’s something disingenuous about the standard ‘don’t shoot the messenger’ response. If the public at large treat dictionaries as arbiters of usage, then in practice, whether their producers like it or not, they do have authority, and therefore some responsibility to reflect on how it should be used.

In some areas it’s clear they have reflected, and concluded that some sanitising is justified. You may have noticed, for example, that Oxford’s entry for ‘woman’ doesn’t propose ‘cunt’ as a synonym: that can’t be because it isn’t used as one, so presumably it’s been excluded on the grounds of its offensiveness. In recent years there’s also been a move to eliminate the casual racism and homophobia which were features of some older dictionary entries (today you’ll find fewer references to ‘savages’ or ‘unnatural acts’). Casual sexism, by contrast, has mostly escaped the cull. I may not agree with Giovanardi’s proposed solution, but I think she’s right to raise this as a problem.

What solution would I be in favour of, then? Essentially, a more context-sensitive, ‘horses for courses’ approach. Different kinds of dictionaries serve different purposes and audiences: there are some cases where I think it would be wrong to sanitise the facts of usage, and others where nothing important would be lost by being a bit more selective.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED)—the massive historical dictionary which is Oxford’s flagship product—contains an entry for ‘woman’ which is an absolute horror-show of sexism: the senses listed include things like

3a. In plural. Women considered collectively in respect of their sexuality, esp. as a means of sexual gratification.
4. Frequently with preceding possessive adjective. A female slave or servant; a maid; esp. a lady’s maid or personal attendant (now chiefly hist.). In later use more generally: a female employee; esp. a woman who is employed to do domestic work.

Further down there’s a long list of delightful idioms containing ‘woman’ (‘woman of the night’, ‘woman of the streets’, ‘woman of easy virtue’) and a section full of even more delightful proverbs and sayings (‘a woman, a dog and a walnut tree/ the more you beat them the better they be’). And many of the illustrative examples, even some of the most recent ones (this entry was last updated in 2011), are as terrible as you’d expect. Any feminist who reads the entry from beginning to end will want to go out and burn the world down. But in this case I believe that’s as it should be. The OED is designed primarily for scholars, and it’s an invaluable repository of cultural as well as linguistic history. Hideous though the ‘woman’ entry is, cleaning it up would do feminism a disservice: it would erase evidence that needs to be preserved for our own and future generations.

The Oxford Dictionary, however, as accessed via iPhones and search engines, is (or should be) a completely different animal. I said earlier that I thought the entry reproduced in Giovanardi’s petition was terrible, and what I meant by that was not only that it’s terribly sexist, but also that it seems poorly designed to meet the needs of those who use this type of dictionary. The basic definition of ‘woman’ is unremarkable (albeit redundant, since this is a high-frequency word that English-speakers generally acquire before they can read), but the thesaurus section is stuffed with archaic terms which would hardly be usable in any contemporary context. Who, in 2019, calls women ‘besoms’, ‘petticoats’ or ‘fillies’?  And if you did encounter one of these expressions in a novel or period drama, the context would make clear what it meant. So what is this list of synonyms good for? What pay-off would its makers cite to justify its rank misogyny?

But in any case, does anyone in real life use their phone, or Google, to look up common words like ‘woman’? After speaking to Emine Saner, I rather belatedly began to wonder what people do use dictionary apps for, and I put out a call on Twitter asking people to tell me if they used them, what they did with them, and what the last word they’d looked up was. Leaving aside the people who replied that they only ever used either bilingual dictionaries or monolingual dictionaries for languages they weren’t native speakers of, the responses clustered in three main categories. In order of frequency, these were

1. Checking the meaning and/or spelling of low-frequency words (examples included ‘obviate’, ‘noctilucent’ and ‘eschatology’)
2. Using the thesaurus element of an entry—or an actual thesaurus app—to find synonyms to use when writing
3. Searching for words while engaged in word-based leisure activities like doing crosswords or playing Scrabble.

One or two people mentioned other uses, like checking the pronunciation of a word they’d only ever met in writing, or looking into the history of a word, or decoding the slang terms used by their children (for this purpose Urban Dictionary was the go-to source). But no one reported looking up basic vocabulary items whose meaning, spelling and pronunciation they already knew. Of course you can’t draw general conclusions from what you’re told by a self-selected sample of your Twitter followers, but it seems possible the Oxford Dictionary entry for ‘woman’ isn’t exerting a malign influence on our attitudes to women, simply because so few of us will ever look at it.

I’m not saying that makes it OK to leave the entry as it is: I do think the dictionary makers should revisit their synonyms and illustrative examples (they could start by getting rid of any expression that no one under the age of 85 has ever uttered). But if I had to make them a to-do list, revising their ‘woman’ entry wouldn’t be at the top. Dictionaries reinforce sexism and gender stereotyping in other ways, which are arguably more pernicious because they’re not so immediately obvious.

An example is the persistent use of sex-stereotyped illustrative examples in entries for words that have nothing to do with sex or gender. I discussed this form of banal sexism in a previous post, prompted by the row that broke out when the anthropologist Michael Oman-Reagan queried the use of ‘a rabid feminist’ in the Oxford Dictionary entry for ‘rabid’. We’ve also got dictionaries for learners of English in which men mop their brows while charwomen mop the floor, and men slip on their shoes while women slip off their dresses. How do these sexist clichés enhance anyone’s understanding of the words ‘slip’ and ‘mop’? Do the entry writers think learners are planning to practise their English on a coach tour of the 1950s?

As I’ve said before, though, my feelings about political activists lobbying dictionaries are mixed: I can see why you might want to put pressure on what are, whether they acknowledge it or not, influential cultural and linguistic institutions, but something that bothers me about this approach (that is, apart from the problems I’ve already mentioned) is its linguistic authoritarianism. It’s buying into the idea that dictionaries can and should lay down the law—that it’s fine for them to prescribe, so long as what they prescribe reflects our own preferences rather than those of our political opponents. I know I’ve used this example before, but let’s not forget that Christian conservatives lobbied dictionaries in an attempt to stop them changing their entries for ‘marriage’ to include the same-sex variety–and progressives applauded when the dictionaries took no notice. In that instance feminists were happy to endorse the principle that dictionaries just record the facts of usage. I don’t think we can reasonably demand that they should be descriptive when it suits us and prescriptive when it doesn’t.

But the deeper problem underlying these contradictory demands is the status we accord to ‘the dictionary’ as the ultimate authority on language. In the past that was something feminists questioned: they were less interested in harnessing the power of what Mary Daly called the ‘dick-tionary’, and more interested in challenging its patriarchal claims to ‘authoritative’ and ‘objective’ knowledge.

During the 1970s, 80s and 90s, a number of feminists produced alternative dictionaries that embodied this challenge in both their content and their form. The compilers of these texts didn’t deny that their selection of headwords, definitions and examples represented a non-neutral point of view; rather they maintained that this was covertly true of all dictionaries (Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler’s A Feminist Dictionary defined a dictionary as ‘a word book. Somebody’s words in somebody’s book’.) Their entries emphasised the variability of meaning—words can mean different things for different speakers—and the fact that it’s contested rather than consensual. Though admittedly they were not much use if what you needed was a definition of ‘noctilucent’.

In some ways, as Lindsay Rose Russell points out in her recent history of women’s contributions to dictionary-making, these late 20th century feminist dictionaries anticipated digital-era efforts to democratise and diversify knowledge, as exemplified by Wikipedia and Wiktionary, and (in a different way) Urban Dictionary. They were anarchic, utopian, and they often featured a multiplicity of voices which they made no attempt to homogenise. They used sources that conventional dictionaries neglected, and tried to amplify the voices those dictionaries had marginalised or muted.

In theory the digital revolution offered an opportunity to develop this tradition further, and perhaps to produce feminist alternatives to the mainstream online dictionaries which most people use today. But in practice that hasn’t happened. Digital knowledge-making communities have been dominated by men, and they can be hostile environments for women—witness the many female Wikipedians who say they’ve been bullied or sidelined by men who treat the site as their turf. Any attempt to create a feminist dictionary online would be a magnet for these mal(e)contents, who would either want to take it over or to take it down. Ironically, there may be less space for feminist lexicography in the limitless expanse of cyberspace than there was in the olden days when dictionaries were books.

But although I regret the fading of the more radical spirit that animated projects like A Feminist Dictionary, I’m not completely opposed to the reformist approach. As Lindsay Rose Russell told Emine Saner, ‘we ought to care what definitions are made most readily available and why’–and we have every right to bring our concerns to the attention of the people responsible for those definitions. Even if Oxford’s public response is defensive or dismissive, I suspect that Maria Beatrice Giovanardi’s petition might still prompt discussion behind the scenes. Its demands won’t be met in full: a descriptive dictionary can’t eliminate all sexism from the record of a language in which sexism is so pervasive. But if it makes the producers aware that a lot of people find their entries for ‘woman’ gratuitously offensive, outdated and useless, they may, eventually, make some changes.* In this case I think they should, and I hope they will.

*since this post was written, the dictionary makers at Oxford have confirmed that they are reviewing their products with a view to getting rid of unnecessary bias in definitions and examples. They also plan to mark derogatory terms more clearly as such–though if those terms are in widespread use they will continue to appear in entries. 

Politics, by definition

That troublesome word ‘woman’ has been causing controversy again.

Last week, a Twitter user who goes by @ShoelessJoe1910 shared two responses from the makers of Collins Dictionaries to people who’d contacted them about the dictionary entry for ‘woman’. One correspondent had received a reply that looked like a standard piece of boilerplate:

As lexicographers, our duty is to report the language as it is used… Whilst we do welcome all feedback received from our users, any changes we make to our definitions are the result of a detailed review process and evidence-based linguistic research.

Another correspondent who raised the same subject got a different response:

Thanks again for contacting us about the definition of ‘woman’. …We are currently reviewing all our gender-related vocabulary to make sure that we accurately reflect the evolution in the vocabulary of gender and sexuality. This review will be completed in the coming months, and your comments will most certainly be taken into account. We always welcome feedback from our users, so do not hesitate to contact us if you notice any other inaccuracies and omissions.

The subject of both communications was whether a dictionary entry for ‘woman’ should define the word as meaning ‘an adult female human being’ (as Collins currently does), or whether it should (also) inform users that ‘woman’ denotes a person who identifies as a woman. The first correspondent wanted the lexicographers to maintain the traditional definition; the second wanted them to change it.

What initially bothered @ShoelessJoe1910 was the contrast between Collins’s dismissive treatment of the first correspondent, a woman, and the deferential manner in which they addressed the second, presumed to be a man (it was later clarified that this correspondent was actually a trans woman). But what drew people into the thread was the question about how ‘woman’ should be defined. Most comments endorsed the traditional definition, and criticised the dictionary for considering any other. Some thought this was an Orwellian plot to cut the cord which tethers language to reality. One was sufficiently incensed to call for a boycott of HarperCollins’s products.

And what, I hear you ask, does this blog think? I think I’m about to piss off both sides in this argument by explaining why I believe it’s pointless to pursue your political objectives by lobbying lexicographers about dictionary definitions.

If you’ve read any of my previous posts about dictionaries, you’ll know that I don’t regard them as just objective and apolitical works of reference. They have historically exhibited all kinds of biases, including androcentrism and casual sexism, and there are some traces of that history which I think it’s reasonable to ask them to get rid of—especially their unreflective use of sex-stereotyped examples illustrating the current usage of words, which is neither necessary nor helpful to their users.

Other kinds of sexism are more difficult for dictionaries to eliminate while still fulfilling their core functions. For instance, if you read Collins’s current online entry for ‘woman’  you’ll see not only some thoroughly sexist example-sentences in the illustration section, but also some secondary senses of ‘woman’ (e.g. ‘domestic servant’; ‘wife, mistress or girlfriend’) and some idioms containing the word (e.g. ‘little woman’, ‘woman of the streets’) which feminists might well find objectionable. But their inclusion is not a mark of the lexicographers’ own sexism, it’s a reflection of the sexism of the community whose usage they’re describing. We might query the range of idioms selected—they’re a pretty dated-looking set—but even if some of them are no longer in common use, they still appear in sources (like Victorian novels) which 21^st century language-users encounter fairly frequently. Dictionaries have quite exacting criteria for declaring a usage obsolete, and one consequence is that they are rich sources of evidence about the prejudices of the past.

But whatever you think about the retention of old usages which offend modern sensibilities, one thing it’s not reasonable to ask lexicographers to do is ignore the development of new usages which express more contemporary attitudes. I’ve given this example before, but it bears repeating: what would we think of an entry for ‘marriage’ that defined it, in 2017, as ‘the union of a man and woman’ or ‘the relationship between a husband and a wife’? That’s what it used to mean, and it’s also what quite a lot of people think it should still mean. But theirs is no longer the majority view: in many parts of the English-speaking world the law has changed to permit same-sex marriage, and the usage of ‘marriage’ reflects that. Dictionaries have therefore felt the need to update their entries for the word. Collins’s, for instance, though it makes no explicit reference to same-sex marriage, is written in pointedly gender-neutral language.

Similarly, the gender-identity-based definition of ‘woman’ now reflects the usage of at least some people in at least some contexts. Whether that usage merits recording in a general-purpose dictionary will depend on the criteria the dictionary uses to decide if something has entered ‘general’ or ‘common’ usage: I assume that’s what the Collins lexicographers will be looking at in their review of gender-related vocabulary. I also assume that if they do decide to record the identity-based sense of ‘woman’, what they’ll do is add this definition to their revised entry, not substitute it for the current one. I’m confident the evidence is not going to show that English-speakers have stopped using ‘woman’ to mean ‘adult female human being’.

In my view, what Collins told the first correspondent was right: ‘thanks for your input, this is a question that’s on our radar, but our decision will be based on analysing a large sample of relevant linguistic data, not on random emails from a few individuals who feel strongly enough to lobby us about it’. That’s also what they should have told the second correspondent. If your policy is to base definitions on corpus evidence about word-usage (and if it isn’t you’re basically just Urban Dictionary) then you should spell that out to everyone who contacts you—ideally without implying that you regard them as either out-of-touch, prescriptive bigots or oracles of wisdom. (Of course, that means that when you say ‘we welcome all feedback from our users’ you’ll be lying about 99% of the time, but such is life for lexicographers. Some of the feedback they get makes the comments in the Daily Mail look sensible.)

If I were in charge of all things linguistic, what I’d want to change with a wave of my magic wand would not be the principles of descriptive lexicography (even if some of its practices could be improved), but the popular attitude which makes dictionaries perennial targets for political lobbying. By treating lexicographers as linguistic quality controllers—if a word or sense makes it into the dictionary that’s taken as a stamp of approval, a vote of confidence, a Papal Bull proclaiming that we should all be using/understanding the word that way—we give them and their products more authority than they deserve.

The view that dictionaries are or should be arbiters rather than just recorders of usage has a long history (interestingly discussed in Anne Curzan’s book Fixing English), and you can still see it reflected in things like Merriam-Webster’s periodic reports on its most popular online ‘look-ups’. The words M-W’s users look up tend to reflect what’s currently in the news: this summer, for instance, the solar eclipse prompted a spike in look-ups for eclipse-related terms like ‘penumbra’, while the ongoing drama of the Trump presidency had people searching out words like ‘impanel’ and ‘recuse’. In these cases, involving technical terms drawn from the registers of science and law, we can imagine people who were previously unfamiliar with a word going to the dictionary’s website to find out what it meant, or maybe how it was pronounced or spelled. But in other cases that’s an unlikely scenario. It’s hardly plausible that all the people who looked up ‘science’ during the row about Trump’s policy on climate change, or those who looked up ‘fact’ after Kellyanne Conway’s infamous reference to ‘alternative facts’, were just trying to remedy their ignorance about the meaning, spelling or pronunciation of these common words. More likely they were engaged in some kind of argument about what ‘science’ did or didn’t cover, or whether ‘alternative facts’ was a contradiction in terms, and had turned to the dictionary for an authoritative ruling.

I’m sure we’ve all at some point been involved in a political argument which someone has proposed to settle by looking a word up in a dictionary. But this will never definitively settle it, because the meanings of words (or at least, the sorts of words that provoke arguments) are always variable and contested; and anyway what you’re arguing about isn’t ultimately the words themselves, it’s the differing ideologies which lie behind the competing senses. Lobbying lexicographers on behalf of your preferred definition is fighting a political battle by proxy. What you need to do to win the battle is change the real-world usage of the word in question (something that will usually go along with  other, nonlinguistic social changes). If the dictionary definition is the only thing that shifts, your victory will be purely symbolic.

You might be thinking: but if people with a political agenda manage to change the definition given in dictionaries, won’t that in itself have an impact on real-world usage? In some cases the answer may be ‘yes’, but only if we’re talking about the sort of obscure word which is typically acquired through instruction rather than through the experience of hearing words used in context. ‘Woman’ is not that kind of word. It’s a basic item of English vocabulary, one of the thousand most common words listed in Collins’s dictionary.

If every dictionary in the world changed its definition of ‘woman’ tomorrow, that still wouldn’t stop future generations from understanding and using it to mean ‘adult female human’. That meaning, still the dominant one, will survive because it will continue to be acquired by children in the course of their everyday interactions. Whether they will also acquire the identity-based meaning is another question, and the answer to it doesn’t depend on the dictionary definition of ‘woman’ either: they’re more likely to be taught it in school, or to encounter it in the media, than to learn it by looking up ‘woman’ in a dictionary.  And if kids are learning the new sense from other sources, keeping it out of the dictionary will do nothing to halt its spread.

I’m not suggesting that all arguments about word-meaning are pointless (if I thought that I’d be in the wrong line of work); what I’m questioning is the equation of a word’s meaning with its dictionary definition, and the associated belief that if you can persuade a dictionary to change (or not change) a definition, you have thereby changed (or safeguarded) the language itself. This attitude to dictionaries is another interesting example of how conservative, when it comes to language, political radicals can be. It’s no good petitioning the King (especially as he abdicated long ago). The struggle for meaning is a grassroots campaign.

A rabid feminist writes…

Last week, the anthropologist Michael Oman-Reagan asked:

Why does the Oxford Dictionary of English portray women as “rabid feminists” with mysterious “psyches” speaking in “shrill voices” who can’t do research or hold a PhD but can do “all the housework”?

The Oxford dictionary he was talking about was the one that comes with Apple devices (Macs, i-Pads, i-Phones), and his question was about the examples that follow the definition of a word and illustrate its use in practice. The ones he reproduced included the phrase ‘a rabid feminist’ illustrating the metaphorical usage of ‘rabid’; the sentence ‘I will never really fathom the female psyche’ exemplifying the use of the term ‘psyche’; and a series of examples featuring women and female voices in entries for ‘shrill’, ‘grating’ and ‘nagging’. He also reproduced entries for the words ‘doctor’ and ‘research’ where the examples referred to doctors/researchers as ‘he’.

The point of this intervention was not just to criticise a few specific entries, but rather to draw attention to a pattern of sexist stereotyping in the dictionary’s illustrative examples. But when Oman-Reagan tweeted to Oxford Dictionaries, citing the ‘rabid feminist’ example, whoever was running their Twitter account that day chose not to acknowledge the deeper point. Instead he was told that (a) the ‘rabid feminist’ example was authentic, and (b) that ‘rabid’ isn’t necessarily a negative term. In the ensuing arguments (first on Twitter and then in lengthier pieces like this and this) the main issue became whether Oxford was endorsing a view of feminists as mad fanatics, and then compounding the offence with its dismissive responses to criticism.

Eventually Oxford apologized for its ‘flippant’ tweets, and promised to review the example in the ‘rabid’ entry, noting that in its corpus (the collection of texts which examples are drawn from) the commonest words found alongside ‘rabid’ are actually ‘fan’ and ‘supporter’. In one way that’s a positive outcome, but in another it’s frustratingly limited: revising a single entry which has been criticized for overt political bias does not address the much larger problem of covert sexism in the dictionary as a whole.

I use the word ‘covert’ for two reasons: first, because most of the sexist examples are incidental, appearing in entries for words which are not specifically ‘about’ women; and second, because much of the sexism will remain invisible if you only look at single entries in isolation. There’s nothing obviously sexist about an entry for ‘research’ where the example sentence uses the pronoun ‘he’; what’s covertly sexist is if there’s a systematic preference for ‘he’ over ‘she’ in all the entries for words denoting intellectual pursuits. The effect is cumulative, and arguably all the more insidious because we’re unlikely to be conscious of the pattern that produces it. This point rather got lost in the debate on ‘rabid feminist’. Oxford was held to account for that particular example, but not for the more systematic bias that Oman-Reagan had detected.

He isn’t by any means the first to have detected it. Feminists who study dictionaries have been complaining about the sexist example problem for decades. I discussed it myself in an earlier post, taking examples from a foreign language learners’ dictionary where the entry for ‘slip’ was illustrated with ‘he slipped on his shoes’ and ‘she slipped off her dress’, while ‘mop’ had men mopping their brows and women mopping floors. Once you’ve become aware of this pattern, you soon start to notice how pervasive it is. It’s not just a problem in one publisher’s products or one type of dictionary.

But whenever it’s pointed out, the dictionary-makers have a tendency to respond in the way Oxford responded to Oman-Reagan. Their examples, they say, are authentic: every phrase or sentence used to illustrate every entry was actually written by a real person in a real context. Dictionaries just describe usage, they don’t judge it, and they certainly don’t censor it. So, don’t shoot the messenger: don’t accuse lexicographers of sexism when they’re only documenting the sexism that exists in the wider world.

Fair point, or lame excuse? I’d say, a bit of both, but more the latter than the former. As Tom Freeman remarked on his Stroppy Editor blog, ‘even if a sentence isn’t theirs, they’ve still made the decision to use it’. And they can’t really argue that they didn’t have other options. The illustrative examples used in contemporary dictionaries come from very large collections of texts—Oxford’s corpus contains over two and a half billion words—so there isn’t a shortage of authentic examples to choose from. In some cases the argument might be made that a sexist example captures something significant about the usage of a word. We might suspect that ‘shrill’ and ‘strident’, for instance, are more often used about women than men. But in most cases it’s neither necessary nor illuminating to reproduce sexist stereotypes.

There’s also something a bit disingenuous about the protestations of dictionary makers that their products simply reflect the world around them. For the average user looking something up on their i-Phone, the dictionary isn’t seen as a neutral document, but as an authority on the existence, meaning, spelling and use of words—a view its publishers are happy to exploit when they use words like ‘authoritative’ in their advertising. It follows, as Tom Freeman observed, that

Dictionaries do help to set the cultural tone, whether they intend to or not. Their job is to describe the language neutrally but beyond that they should also be aware of how they come across. For example, I have a battered Oxford dictionary from 1969 on my shelf. It defines “jazz” as “syncopated music, & dance, of U.S. Negro origin”. Today, the Oxford website says jazz is “of black American origin”.

As this example suggests, there are areas of usage where the editors of dictionaries are anxious not to come across as culturally insensitive. The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (begun in the late 19th century and completed in the early 20th), contained numerous definitions and examples which would now be considered horrendously racist—and not only because they used words like ‘Negro’ (which, though offensive today, was regarded as a polite term in 1969). A famous example is the original entry for ‘canoe’, which distinguished between the type used by white people for sport and leisure, and the more ‘primitive’ type used by ‘savages’ as a mode of transport. This kind of thing has been weeded out during the ongoing process of revising the OED. But the sexism displayed in entries like the ones Michael Oman-Reagan reproduced does not seem to have been targeted in the same way.

Why is that? Partly, it may be because sexist examples are distributed in a different way from racist ones. Whereas racism tends to be concentrated in entries for words that relate directly to particular groups and cultures (like ‘jazz’ or ‘canoe’), sexism is an incidental feature of a much wider range of entries. To deal with it systematically, you’d not only have to get rid of the obvious stereotypes, you’d also have to look at the overall balance of your examples—for instance, check that you had roughly equal numbers with ‘she’ and ‘he’, distributed in a non-stereotypical way. Precisely because it’s so pervasive, eliminating sexism would be a major undertaking.

But I can’t help wondering if there’s a more basic problem here: most people just aren’t that offended by sexism—or at least, by the low-level sexism of clichés like ‘I will never really fathom the female psyche’. It’s a bit like the treatment of sexist verbal abuse in schools or football grounds, which is often talked about as if it were a different thing from the racist or homophobic equivalent: it gets put under the heading of ‘banter’, and women who complain are seen as humourless and over-sensitive.

The dismissive tweets for which Oxford later apologized were very much in that tradition. Their tone suggested that whoever wrote them did not feel obliged to take complaints of sexism seriously, and did not expect that stance to attract criticism. On this occasion the negative reaction prompted a climbdown–an apology for flippancy and a promise to look again at the example people had objected to. But if we want to see the problem of sexism addressed in a less piecemeal way, we’re going to have to keep sending the message that we don’t think it’s trivial or a joke. Become, in short, a bit less tolerant and a bit more rabid.

Lesbian slang: a postscript

In my last post I quoted the folklorist Gershon Legman, whose introduction to a 1941 glossary of gay slang drew attention to ‘the seeming absence of almost any but outsiders’ slang in relation to female homosexuality’. I also pointed out that his comments on this subject said as much about his own limitations as they did about the language of lesbians.

This prompted some readers to wonder what Legman had missed: apart from the few terms his glossary included (such as ‘bull-dike’, ‘bulldagger’ and ‘daddy’, all labels for a butch or masculine lesbian), what terms were actually in use among lesbians before the advent of women’s and gay liberation? This postscript will address that question–though for the reasons I mentioned in my earlier discussion, what we know is unlikely to be the full story.

I’m fortunate to have had help from someone who knows a lot more than most–the lexicographer Jonathon Green, editor of Green’s Dictionary of Slang. This is a historical slang dictionary (you can see some of the data from it visually represented on a tumblr whose self-explanatory name is The Timelines of Slang): to compile it, Green sifted through a range of source material including, for instance, pulp fiction and muckraking journalism, as well as the work of earlier lexicographers and academics. I’m grateful to him for giving me access to his data, though he can’t be held responsible for what I’ve made of it.

Before I go on, I should point out that what’s mainly been documented by slang historians is not some generic ‘language of homosexuals’, but the in-group vocabulary of a subculture which only some gay men and lesbians were part of, while others avoided it or had no access to it. As late as the mid-1970s, research investigating gay men’s knowledge of what was supposed to be ‘their’ slang found that many didn’t use or even know the words in question. This research didn’t include lesbians, but it’s likely that many women, too, were unfamiliar with in-group slang because they were isolated from any larger community .

Even if they were not isolated, lesbians did not form a single, internally homogeneous group. Historical evidence from the US shows there were differences in the slang used by Black and white lesbians; there was also a big difference between upper-class bohemians (the targets of Legman’s dismissive remark that a lot of what passed for lesbianism was just ‘a faddish vice among the intelligentsia’), and working-class women whose social lives were conducted in the bars and on the streets, and whose activities in some cases led to repeated stints in prison.What’s mostly presented under the heading of lesbian slang is the usage of the latter group.

Examining that usage underlines a point made in 1969 by the anthropologist David Sonenschein: ‘The language of homosexuality’, he wrote,

is basically the language of social and sexual relationships rather than of the sexual act itself. The deviancy of homosexual sexual orientation has been so salient…that previous research has ignored two main and very real factors of homosexual life: (1) its social complexity and (2) its relatively unexotic (even unerotic) nature as a total lifestyle.

Sonenschein went on to point out that in glossaries like Legman’s, what he called ‘role terms’ were approximately twice as numerous as ‘sex terms’. Virtually all the lesbian-specific terms Legman included fall into the ‘role term’ category, and the same pattern is evident in later sources, with the largest number of terms relating to the central role distinction between butch and fem.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, some of the most interesting sources are accounts of life in women’s prisons, which reproduced inmates’ stories in their own words. Two notable examples, both from the 1960s, were Rose Giallombardo’s academic study Society of Women, and the journalist Sara Harris’s book Hellhole: The Shocking Story of the Inmates and Life in the New York City House of Detention for Women. Not all the slang recorded in these texts was specifically lesbian slang, as opposed to general prison slang, but ‘the racket’ (as inmates called the lesbian subculture) was clearly a salient aspect of prison life.

Prison slang made a distinction between women who were lesbians on the outside, and women who turned to lesbianism only while incarcerated. The latter were known as ‘j.t.s’ (short for ‘jailhouse turnouts’), ‘dogs’ or ‘guttersnipers’–derogatory terms indicating the low regard in which they were often held. In some cases they appear to have been subjected to a degree of coercion: there was a word, ‘flagging’, for older inmates’ attempts to involve younger ones in sexual activities. The evidence suggests that this practice existed in both prisons and reform schools, and that young women sometimes submitted because, as one told Harris, ‘you got to belong or get hurt’.

As on the outside, relationships on the inside were typically organized around the butch/fem role division. The butch (known as, among other terms, a ‘stud broad’, ‘king’ or ‘pop’) was the dominant partner both socially (Giallombardo noted that the fem was expected to ‘give him respect’) and sexually. Taking the active role in sex was known as ‘giving up the work to someone’, an expression whose use is illustrated by this quote from Hellhole:

And that, says Lucky, was the last time she ever played femme and let anybody give up the work to her. From that day on, she knew herself to be a dyke and she was the one who gave the work up to other girls.

Lesbian slang overlapped not only with prison slang, but also with the vocabulary of other groups whose members were engaged in illicit sexual activities. An example is the verb ‘mac(k)’: applied to lesbians, it meant ‘to act in a masculine manner’ (to ‘mack it’ was to wear men’s clothing). Applied to men, however, the same verb could mean ‘to work as a pimp’. Because they were all viewed as sexual deviants and/or criminals, lesbians, gay men and people working in the commercial sex trade inhabited a shared underground social world; their networks intersected, and that was reflected in their vocabularies.

Some gay men and lesbians were directly involved in the sex trade, most commonly through working as prostitutes. For some this was a regular occupation, while for others it was more occasional: Sara Harris reports that ‘when they needed to, femmes and butches […] picked up tricks and put on circuses [i.e., performances of lesbian sex] for them’. There were also women who would pay to have sex with a woman. The term ‘jane’ (a female analogue of ‘john’) is recorded, referring to ‘the female client of a streetwalker’, as is the use of the word ‘freak’ to describe a woman who catered to lesbians.

Jonathon Green observes that what slang dictionaries offer is ‘an oral history of marginality and rebellion, of dispossession and frustration’. They make visible a world which standard, ‘general purpose’ dictionaries either pass over in silence or handle with metaphorical tongs (as I noted in a previous post, the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary declined to include the word lesbian itself until 1976). But this does not reveal everything about a marginalized community’s life: it’s in the nature of slang to be more concerned with some areas of experience than others. You may have noticed, for instance, that the themes of the vocabulary I’ve been discussing include sex, commerce and power, but not love, affection and other tender feelings,  though those must also have existed and been expressed between women.

It’s also difficult to see this vocabulary as either a language of conscious political resistance to oppression or a proto-feminist language of sisterhood. Though lesbians as a group occupied a precarious position in male dominated society, the subculture had its own power hierarchies: women could be exploited not only by men, but also by other women–like the older women who put pressure on younger ones in prisons, or the richer women who paid poorer ones for sex. It’s a reminder, if we needed one, that women have no special claim to superior moral virtue, and that oppression does not generally make people behave like saints.

As a linguist who’s interested in the history of English, I’m happy to have a record of terms like ‘hawk’ (a lesbian who makes pick-ups on the street), ‘jasper’ (African American prison slang for a lesbian), ‘mantee’ (a masculine lesbian), ‘ruffle’ (a fem) and ‘sil’ (short for ‘silly’, meaning a lesbian who’s infatuated with another woman). But I wouldn’t want to live in the world they belonged to. Creative and colourful though the words may have been, I’m glad that social change has made them history. .

Dictionaries, dick-tionaries and dyketionaries

Exactly ten years ago, in June 2005, I was contacted by a man from the British Potato Board. He wanted me, in my capacity as a professor of the English language at Oxford University, to endorse the Board’s campaign to get the expression ‘couch potato’ removed from the Oxford English Dictionary. It gave potatoes a bad name, he explained, by suggesting they were unhealthy, when in fact they were virtually a superfood, packed with fibre and vitamin C. The Board wanted the OED to replace ‘couch potato’ with ‘couch slouch’, which would convey the same meaning without unfairly maligning potatoes.

Initially I suspected this was a wind-up; but then a group of people turned up, dressed in potato costumes, to protest outside the offices of the OED’s publisher, Oxford University Press. Basically it was a publicity stunt: I’ve never been sure how serious they were about getting the dictionary to alter its entry. But even if the aim was just to get media coverage for the health benefits of potatoes, the campaign still traded on the popular belief that dictionaries function as a kind of supreme authority on the existence, validity and meaning of words. As if removing ‘couch potato’ from the dictionary were equivalent to banishing it from the language.

This attitude was on display again last week when it was announced that the most recent additions to the OED included an entry for the word cisgender.  On one hand you had people triumphantly hailing this news as proof that the word, and by extension the concept it denotes, is both real and legitimate.  On the other hand you had people—many of them feminists who dispute the political analysis behind the word—saying that the OED should not be giving legitimacy to such a flawed and biased term.

When I hear this kind of argument I feel pulled in two directions. The linguist part of me wants to defend the OED, explaining–just as I explained to the man from the British Potato Board–that the function of modern dictionaries isn’t to authorize words or make judgments on their value, it’s to document their existence and the way they’re used in the language. The main criterion for adding new words is that they have entered mainstream usage. Cisgender, for instance, used to be a little-known piece of in-group jargon, but now it turns up regularly in publications like newspapers which are aimed at a general audience.

Since the OED is a historical dictionary, whose aim is to chart the development of English vocabulary over time, it’s full of words which are obsolete, arcane, useless, offensive or frankly silly. Like scrolloping, a word that appeared once in the work of Virginia Woolf. Or phlogiston, an 18th century name for a chemical element that never actually existed. Learned discussions of phlogiston completely misrepresented reality, but the word was once in regular use, so the OED records it. It’s now doing the same for cisgender: even if you think the concept is to 21st century gender theory what phlogiston was to 18th century chemistry, there’s no good argument for not including it in a historical dictionary of English.

But if that last paragraph sounds like a straightforward defence of modern dictionary-making as an objective, value-free, scientific enterprise, let me clarify that I don’t think it’s that straightforward. That’s why I said I feel pulled in two directions. I’m a feminist as well as a linguist: I may not agree with those sisters who have complained about the OED’s inclusion of cisgender, but I have no doubt that mainstream dictionaries, including the OED, belong to an androcentric (male-centred) and sexist tradition. Since all major dictionaries rely heavily on past scholarship, the traces of earlier male bias are still highly visible; and some forms of bias have persisted into the present.

Criticizing the male bias of mainstream lexicography was a serious concern for feminists in the 1970s and 1980s, and so was making alternatives to what Mary Daly dubbed the ‘dick-tionary’:

Dick-tionary, n: any patriarchal dictionary: a derivative, tamed and muted lexicon compiled by dicks.

The source I’m quoting here was a product of this alternative tradition: Daly and Caputi’s Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language, originally published in 1987. But while Daly’s reputation has kept the Wickedary visible to later generations of feminists, the fact that it was part of a flourishing enterprise of feminist dictionary-making is less well known, as are most of the other dictionaries second wave feminists produced (though many are still available, and I’ve added links where that’s the case).

In 2011, Lindsay Rose Russell published a scholarly article, ‘This is what a dictionary looks like’, which lists 18 examples of feminist dictionaries published between 1970 and 2006 (though the largest number appeared in the 1970s and 1980s). She was prompted to write by the appearance of a weighty tome about the history of lexicography which failed to mention a single feminist dictionary—though it did discuss specialist dictionaries of agriculture, botany, chemistry, law, medicine, seafaring and surnames. This struck Russell as a classic case of feminism being written out of history. Like her article, this post is an attempt to write it back in.

Serious feminist criticism of mainstream/malestream dictionaries began to appear in the early 1970s, when several kinds of systematic male bias were identified. These included

Selection of sources. The pre-existing source material from which lexicographers take their evidence about word-usage (which words are used, and with what range of meanings) has historically been heavily skewed towards texts written by male rather than female authors. While recently some attempt has been made to redress the balance, the overall bias remains an issue.

Androcentrism in selecting and defining words. As more dictionaries have moved online, the pressure to exclude words for reasons of space has been reduced, but in the past editors did have to make judgments on what was important or central and what was trivial or peripheral, and their decisions often reflected a male/masculist perspective. So did some of their definitions: Alma Graham, who was involved in making a non-sexist school dictionary in the early 1970s, cites one dictionary that defined youth as ‘the part of life between childhood and manhood’.

One word the OED treated for decades as both too peripheral and, we might suspect, too distasteful to include, was lesbian. It has been used in print since the 18th century, so by the OED’s usual criteria it would certainly have merited an entry; but it was not only left out of the original edition (along with a number of other words the Victorian editors preferred to pass over in silence), it was also excluded from the supplement produced to update the dictionary in 1933, though the editor at that point did add the term homosexual. When lesbian finally got an entry, in a further supplement published in 1976, one of the quotations used to illustrate its use was this gem from the work of the writer Cecil Day Lewis:

I shall never write real poetry. Women never do, unless they’re invalids, or Lesbians, or something.

This brings us neatly to another kind of bias feminists criticized in the 1970s:

Sexism in illustrative quotations. The OED isn’t the only dictionary that gives examples (either real quotations or made-up sentences) to illustrate how words are used: this is also a feature of many pedagogic dictionaries, designed for schoolchildren or foreign language learners. And in some of the most popular learners’ dictionaries, reading the examples is like flicking through a catalogue of offensive gender stereotypes.

A student of mine who did a project on this topic found that one of the dictionaries she analysed had a pattern of alternating between male and female references in illustrative quotations: this may have been meant to ensure gender ‘balance’, but the effect was almost comically sexist, as though the examples had been chosen by Benny Hill. In its entry for the verb slip, for instance, the dictionary offered ‘he slipped on his shoes and went outside’ followed by ‘she slipped out of her dress’. Another classic, illustrating the verb mop, had ‘he took out a handkerchief and mopped his brow’ alongside ‘the charwoman had just mopped the linoleum that covered the stairs’. Though they compiled it in the 1990s, the makers of this dictionary apparently felt that what foreign learners needed was a good understanding of the gender roles that prevailed in Britain circa 1953 (also the class relations and the household technology—when did anyone last see a ‘charwoman’ wielding a mop?)

One feminist response to these shortcomings was to try to reform the dick-tionary from within (as with the nonsexist school dictionary discussed by Alma Graham), but there was also a flurry of explicitly oppositional feminist dictionary-making. Its products were varied in their form and political aims. Daly and Caputi’s Wickedary is part of a ‘utopian’ subgenre which also includes Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig’s earlier Lesbian Peoples: Material for A Dictionary (1979). Other feminists focused on recording and defining feminism’s own terminology (e.g. Joreen and Marleen Dixon’s Dictionary of Women’s Liberation (1970)), offering alternatives to sexist words (e.g. Rosalie Maggio’s The Nonsexist Wordfinder (1987)), or conversely listing and critically discussing them (e.g. Jane Mills’s Womanwords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Patriarchal Society (1989), which explores the history of misogyny by looking at the evolution of terms like frigid, hysteria and slut).

There were also examples like Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler’s A Feminist Dictionary (1985), which offered a direct challenge to the dick-tionary’s authority and its claims to objectivity. Kramarae and Treichler made no such claims. In some entries they defined a word (e.g. ‘powerlessness’) by simply juxtaposing quotations in which it had appeared, all taken from the speech and writing of feminist women. In other cases they offered a gloss which was designed to make visible the biases rendered invisible by the standard, supposedly neutral definition:

CUCKOLD. The husband of an unfaithful wife. The wife of an unfaithful husband is just called wife.

The first part of this does not differ greatly from what you might find in a non-feminist dictionary entry for cuckold, but the second part pointedly draws attention to the absence of any parallel term for a woman whose husband is unfaithful, and so makes a (non-neutral) comment on the underlying sex inequality.

In 1992 A Feminist Dictionary was reissued under the new title Amazons, Bluestockings and Crones. Lindsay Rose Russell calls this ‘a move from suffragist to supplement’: it makes the book sound less like a challenge to the conventions and the authority of the mainstream product, and more like ‘a harmless helpmate to the lexicographical tradition, a dictionary of boutique terms (Amazon, bluestocking, crone)’. Later examples continue the ‘harmless helpmate’ theme, bearing titles like From the Goddess to the Glass Ceiling (1996) and Wimmin, Wimps and Wallflowers (2001). There are also collections of words coined by and for a specific community or subculture, like the Chicago-based online Dyketionary. These are not aiming to talk back to the dick-tionary, to criticize its sexism or question its objectivity. They are, as Russell says, supplementary lists of ‘boutique terms’.

It could be argued that the function of the second-wave feminist dictionary has been superseded by more recent developments. On one hand, new technology has enabled mainstream dictionaries to expand their coverage and widen the range of sources they trawl through, thus reducing some of the old biases (it’s also worth pointing out that many mainstream lexicographers today are women: they may or may not be feminists, but they aren’t bearded Victorian patriarchs who find women alien and faintly repulsive). On the other hand, new media have democratised the process of recording and defining words, bringing us completely crowd-sourced examples of amateur/popular lexicography like Urban Dictionary, or Dyketionary.

But I wouldn’t make that argument myself, or at least not unreservedly. The response to Oxford’s announcement about cisgender shows that the authority of the established, mainstream dictionary has not been superseded. It also shows that there are still gaps in the public understanding of what lexicographers do, and how they go about it. If one consequence is that feminists sometimes make specific criticisms of dictionaries that (in my view) are misplaced, another is that they don’t make more general criticisms that are still highly pertinent.

That was one of the functions of feminist dictionaries. They were much more than boutique wordlists. Outdated though much of their content is, they offer, as Lindsay Rose Russell says, ‘a usable past’ for feminists reimagining the dictionary today.