Remove ‘sexist’ definitions of woman, petition demands
Written by News on 18/09/2019
A petition for the removal of “sexist” dictionary definitions of the word ‘woman’ and to extend the entry to include transgender and lesbian women has been signed by almost 30,000 people.
Campaigners are calling on the Oxford Thesaurus of English and the Oxford Dictionary of English, which reflects every-day language use rather than academic or scholarly definitions, to remove “unacceptable” language in the texts.
Maria Beatrice Giovanardi launched the petition against Oxford University Press (OUP) this summer.
She writes: “Have you ever searched online for the definition of a woman? ‘Bitch, besom, piece, bit, mare, baggage, wench, petticoat, frail, bird, bint, biddy, filly’ – these are the words which the Oxford’s English Dictionary online tells us mean the same as ‘woman’. This sexist dictionary must change.”
She also cites examples of the definition of woman as including “Ms September will embody the professional, intelligent yet sexy career woman” and “I told you to be home when I get home, little woman”.
Ms Giovanardi argues that part of efforts to tackle online abuse against young women is to look at language.
The petition has three goals: to “eliminate” phrases that are discriminatory or patronising to women, to enlarge the entry for woman and to include representative of minorities, such as a transgender woman.
OUP’s head of lexical content strategy, Katherine Connor Martin, told The Guardian that editors are considering whether the definition of woman needs expanding and that entries are adapted as the use of English changes over time.
“If there is evidence of an offensive or derogatory word or meaning being widely used in English, it will not be excluded from the dictionary solely on the grounds that it is offensive or derogatory,” she said.
“Nonetheless, part of the descriptive process is to make a word’s offensive status clear in the dictionary’s treatment. For instance, the phrase the little woman is defined as ‘a condescending way of referring to one’s wife’, and the use of ‘bit’ as a synonym for woman is labelled as ‘derogatory’ in the thesaurus,” she added.
(c) Sky News 2019: Remove ‘sexist’ definitions of woman, petition demands
