Confessions of a logophile…

Gender crittery and word games

Adapted from Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass, by John Tenniel (1871): public domain

This week the Cambridge dictionary “re-defined” “woman”. Note: the parallel quote marks: they are relevant. Of course, the usual suspects went into meltdown. And of course, as usual, the usual suspects were mostly wrong.

Now read on…

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I mean, that, in a nutshell, is it. The whole story. (Apart from me being invited onto LBC to defend the decision: more on that in a bit).

The folks whose literal job it is is to catalogue language updated their catalogue and discovered that the word “woman” is used in a lot of places to indicate “an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth”

You might not espesh like that, but it is indisputably a fact that that is happening. It’s not the fault of the Cambridge Dictionary — and having a go at them is pretty pointless. Unless you enjoy shooting the messenger. Nor is it some sort of establishment plot. No memo went out from Tranz Central ordering our fifth columnists working on dictionaries around the world to change the entry. It just doesn’t work that way.

Words change

Words are slippery things. They are constantly changing their uses — and hence their…