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Dictionary wars: a thread. For everyone who’s been in my mentions all day complaining about a petition that suggested the Oxford Dictionary entry for ‘woman’ might include an example containing ‘trans woman’. /1
This was actually a pretty throwaway suggestion at the end of a long list of other demands. But even if it hadn’t been, the anger about it is misplaced. Lobbying dictionaries to make their definitions fit your political preferences is misguided—(which is why I didn’t sign)/2
The Christian right in the US lobbied major dictionaries about the definition of ‘marriage’: they said, don’t change your definition to include same-sex marriage, because that’s not what marriage means, it’s the union between a man and a woman. /3
The dictionaries ignored them. They don’t care about the rights and wrongs of the equal marriage argument.They care about accurately representing the way English-speakers use words. If enough people use ‘marriage’ to mean the same-sex kind, that fact will be added to the entry /4
Similarly, it is a fact that the term ‘trans woman’ exists and is used—and is a compound containing the word ‘woman’, so could be included in an entry along with other ‘woman’ compounds. A dictionary is about *words*, not political arguments about what a woman is /5
You may not like the fact that this term exists, but don’t blame the dictionary for its existence /6
Also: don’t imagine that if a word is in the dictionary that’s some kind of endorsement. Are dictionaries pro-fascist if they include an entry for ‘fascism’? Are they misogynist if they have an entry for ‘whore’? /7
Dictionaries don’t dictate the meanings of words, especially common words like ‘woman’—which no native speaker of English ever learned the meaning of by looking it up in a dictionary. They are records based on the evidence of usage /8
A petition might prompt them to check the evidence, but it won’t make them change an entry if the evidence isn’t already there. (Or keep it the same if the evidence shows a change, as with ‘marriage’) /9
Asking them not to alter their entries for ‘marriage’ or ‘woman’ is like asking the publisher of a history textbook to avoid mentioning a deplorable historical event like the Trail of Tears or the Peterloo Massacre: it’s confusing the thing with the record of the thing. /10
We don’t know what changes OUP’s lexicographers will make, if any, but I expect them to be based on evidence about the actual use of ‘woman’, not the petitioners’ views (or my views or anyone’s views) about what it should or shouldn’t mean. /11
And whatever they do, it won’t change the facts on the ground: people will go on using the word ‘woman’ to mean what they think it means, and the argument between people who define it differently will continue /12
