A dictionary entry citing ‘rabid feminist’ doesn’t just reflect prejudice, it reinforces it
A dictionary entry citing ‘rabid feminist’ doesn’t just reflect prejudice, it reinforces it
Emer O'Toole
Objectionable phrases may be widely used, but the Oxford English Dictionary has a responsibility to define them by other means.
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‘Oxford Dictionaries has explained that these sexist sentences reflect common usage.’ Photograph: Denis Closon/Rex Features
A Canadian anthropologist, Michael Oman-Reagan, tweeted Oxford Dictionaries last week to ask it why “rabid feminist” is the OED’s usage example for the word “rabid”. Oxford Dictionaries responded by suggesting Oman-Regan may be a rabid feminist. It has since apologised for the “flippant” response and is reviewing the example sentence. Other sexist OED sample sentences, according to Oman-Regan, include those for words such as shrill, nagging and bossy. Oxford Dictionaries has explained that these sentences reflect common usage – which I do not doubt – and do not represent the views of the publisher Oxford University Press. But they also, of course, reflect an editorial decision.
According to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life”. The example “rabid feminist” is possible because of its relationship to our form of life – a life in which women are caricatured as shrill, bossy and nagging, and caring about women’s rights is extreme and fanatical.
Wittgenstein believes that “the meaning of a word is its use in language”. Explaining words is not simply a matter of defining a discrete object or concept. Rather, it’s a matter of locating that object or concept in the complex web of usages that we share. In fact, as Wittgenstein shows, for a word to function in language, it does not actually to have to refer to any specific thing. A word’s meaning can exist entirely in how it is used. He explains this abstract idea with this delicious thought experiment:
“Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a ‘beetle’. No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. But suppose the word ‘beetle’ had a use in these people’s language? If so, it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. No one can ‘divide through’ the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.”
Sexism row prompts Oxford Dictionaries to review language used in definitions
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As the above illustration of an abstract concept suggests, and as the editors of the OED should recognise, giving examples, to quote Wittgenstein again, “is not an indirect means of explaining … For any general definition can be misunderstood too.” Examples are as important to our understanding as definitions – they connect the threads of that shared web of usages.
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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/26/rabid-feminist-language-oxford-english-dictionary
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the example they chose was FEMINIST!!!?????! 
