1/19/2024 0 Comments Oxford dictionaries rabid![]() As the University of Oxford linguist Deborah Cameron puts it, when Oxford Dictionaries says its examples “come from real-world use,” it’s suggesting that “the sexism is in the world, and we just describe it.” This reasoning turns out not to hold up in the case of “rabid feminist,” though: Oxford tweeted that when its lexicographers searched their corpus-the archive of linguistic data, drawn from books, newspapers, and other writing, from which most dictionaries select example sentences-they found that combinations like “rabid fan” and “rabid supporter” were more commonly used therefore, linguists told me, the entry might warrant adjusting for reasons of accuracy as well as sensitivity. The question of how to eradicate it is bound up in a broader debate about the role of lexicography: Should dictionaries be proscriptive, establishing a standard of usage, or should they be descriptive, reflecting usage as it exists in the world? In the eyes of editors, their mandate is the latter. Oman-Reagan says that his detractors started at least two online forums devoted to harassing him, while the head of content creation at Oxford Dictionaries, Katherine Connor Martin, told me that watching men’s-rights activists defend the dictionary was, for her, “not a proud moment.” Oxford ultimately tweeted an apology, with a promise to review the “rabid” example sentence, but made no public mention of “shrill,” “psyche,” or the other problem entries.įeminists and linguists have been talking about the sexism that lurks beneath the surface of dictionaries since at least the nineteen-sixties. Apple’s example sentence for “shrill” referenced “women’s voices,” and the one for the word “psyche” read, “I will never really fathom the female psyche.” Oman-Reagan found that the pronouns in entries for “doctor” and “research” were male, while a “she” could be found doing “housework.” He kept up his barrage on Oxford, which finally issued a flippant response on Friday: “If only there were a word to describe how strongly you felt about feminism.” It added, in a subsequent tweet, “Our example sentences come from real-world use.” The online melee that ensued left no one unscathed. It was, and so was the example phrase provided: “a rabid feminist,” it read.Īlarmed by what struck him as a dated and offensive construction, Oman-Reagan took a screen shot of the page and tweeted it at Oxford Dictionaries with the suggestion, “maybe change that?” When he woke up the next morning, he found that his rebuke had been retweeted and favorited hundreds of times, and his followers were sending him their own discoveries. He pulled up the definition of “rabid” on his Mac’s dictionary, whose content is licensed from Oxford Dictionaries he wanted to make sure that the word was as pejorative as he intended. The idea of a “rabid sports fan” popped into his head and struck him as just the attitude he was seeking to convey. Illustration by Roman MuradovĪ few days after the Democratic Presidential debate in January, Michael Oman-Reagan, a doctoral student in anthropology at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, was composing a tweet about the problems with American voters, and he was searching for the perfect word. ![]() ![]() After a recent controversy over dictionary entries containing examples like “rabid feminist” and “nagging wife,” lexicographers must decide whether it’s possible to describe the language without sanctioning its ugly side. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |