Dictionary activism is really a thing. Check this out, bhuahahaha.

In postmodernism you can even re-define recession. Its all in the language for these fruitcakes.

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Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture, 1st Edition by Geoffrey Hughes (2011)

Chapter 3: Words and Authorities: Dictionaries and Lexicographers

Political correctness can be seen as the establishment of new agendas by the introduction of new terms and the redefinition of established words. We will discuss the evolution of the word field of political correctness in the next chapter, but it is important first to consider briefly the whole issue of words and their definition, whether by dictionaries, authorities, or pressure groups. Reflecting what Jacques Derrida called the “logocentric” emphasis in Western epistemology, the glossary and the dictionary have understandably always had a revered status in definition. This despite the problematic facts that words do not have stable meanings over time, nor do they always have agreed meanings, even in a given speech community at a given time. Despite these vagaries, it is common to encounter the mode of argument which starts with a dictionary definition as if it were an undisputed fact.

There is the basic problem over whether historical definitions should take precedence over current meanings. From Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) onwards the historical method has been dominant in major dictionaries.

By this method meanings are separated chronologically from the earliest to the latest. In the nature of things, the earliest will be closer to the etymological root of the word. By the “argument from etymology” this is often fallaciously assumed to be the “real” meaning. Thus democracy is routinely defined etymologically as “government by the people,” even though this political notion is greatly watered down into “representative democracy,” with additional compromises accommodating corporate power via lobbying and so on. Only in Switzerland are major political and social decisions actually made by the people voting in referenda. The rival claims of historical and current meanings are often juxtaposed in discussions of controversial terms like ethnic slurs, such as nigger and Jew, aspects covered in Lakoff (2000, p. 89) and Burchfield (1989, pp. 83–108).

Dictionaries tend to be regarded as impersonal authorities, even though earlier works by Dr Johnson and others clearly bore the stamp of their authors’ personalities and prejudices. Furthermore, older dictionaries tended to reflect established written usage, preferring what Johnson called “the wells of English undefiled,” eschewing words which were “new-fangled” or “low.” Today, of course, dictionaries cast their nets wider and deeper, trawling words to vie with each other in being all things, namely “authoritative,” “up to date,” and “comprehensive,” with selling points such as Collins English Dictionary’s “Find out what the very latest buzz words mean.”

However, there was a vibrant tradition of underground dictionaries which actually preceded what is regarded as the “proper” dictionary. Much like Urban Dictionary today. These “canting” dictionaries dated back to Elizabethan times and explicated the thriving underworld slang of gambling, brothels, card-sharping, and confidence tricksters. A surprisingly fruitful source of politically incorrect attitudes is Captain Francis Grose’s splendid Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785, 1794).

Among various ironic absurdities Grose has snowball: “a jeering appellation for a negro”; the euphemism blue skin: “a person begotten on a black woman by a white man”; negroes’ heads: “brown loaves delivered to the ships”; frosty face: “one pitted with the small pox,” and porker for a Jew. More surprising are horse godmother: “a large masculine woman” and riding St George: “the woman uppermost in the amorous congress, that is, the dragon upon St George.” Among national nicknames tinged with xenophobia Grose included Itchland for Scotland and Bogtrotter for Irishman. Numerous terms referring to the gruesome ritual of public hanging, often with a good measure of schadenfreude, are covered in the section on “Crime and Punishment” in chapter 6. Yet in some ways the prejudices of Johnson and the frank humor of Grose are preferable to the appearance of impartiality given by major works.

The monumental Oxford English Dictionary (OED; 1884–1928) was the collaboration of James Murray (pre-eminently), Henry Bradley, William Craigie, and C. T. Onions “with the assistance of many scholars and men of science.” For decades it was regarded as above serious criticism, although there were omissions and deficiencies. However, in his Keywords (1976), Raymond Williams expressed these reservations: “. . . the air of massive impersonality which the Oxford Dictionary communicates is not so impersonal, so purely scholarly, or so free of active social and political values as might be supposed from occasional use. Indeed, to work closely in it is at times to get a fascinating insight into what can be called the ideology of its editors” (1976, p. 16). Ania Loomba points out, for example, that the OED definition of colony is framed from the point of view of the colonizer, not the colonized (2005, p. 1). Suffragette is defined as “A female supporter of the cause of women’s political enfranchisement, esp. one of a violent or ‘militant’ type.”

Aspects of gender and class in lexicography, not much canvassed previously, have surfaced in the discussions of Willinsky (1994) and Mugglestone (2000). In The Empire of Words, Willinsky criticized the OED in the words of Jonathon Green, for being overly middle-class, masculinist, chauvinist, imperialist, and insulting to minority groups (1996, p. 373). From their earliest appearance in the sixteenth century up until the latter part of the twentieth century, dictionaries on both sides of the Atlantic were written exclusively by men, mainly bourgeois men. Mugglestone (2005) shows that behind the phalanxes of imperturbable type considerable differences of editorial opinion played themselves out, with very few female voices being consulted. This practice extended up to the OED Supplement (1972–86), edited by R. W. Burchfield and an editorial team, half of which were women.

Words and Women

As far back as 1949 the seminal feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir made this programmatic recommendation: “Language is inherited from a masculine society and contains many male prejudices . . . Women simply have to steal the instrument; they don’t have to break it or try a priori to make it something totally different. Steal it and use it for their own good” (1972, p. 123).

The response came much later in the form of various examples of feminist redefinitions in publications mainly or exclusively written by women. These have expanded from Oz (launched in February 1967) and Spare Rib (launched in June 1972) to become a new genre, concerned with the redefinition of experience from a woman’s and a feminist perspective.

Some, such as Jane Mills’s Womanwords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Patriarchal Society (1989), a recasting of entries in the OED, show rigorous scholarship. Others are more obviously propagandist. Thus Casey Miller and Kate Swift in their Handbook of Non-Sexist Writing (1981) claimed some new currencies and meanings. On fellow they asserted: “All forms of the word – with the exception of fellow-man – can be used sex-inclusively” (p. 98). Similarly, they claim, “Fathering has acquired the meaning of ‘caring for or looking after someone,’ previously ascribed only to mothering” (p. 79).

More radically, A Feminist Dictionary (1985) by Cheris Kramarae and Paula A. Treichler preferred “a flexible format [that] is a conscious effort to honor the words and arguments of women, to liberate our thinking about what can be said about language, and to guard against lexicographical ownership of words and definitions” (1985, p. 17). But “lexicographical ownership of words,” advocated by de Beauvoir, is precisely what the semantic aspect of the debate is all about.

Furthermore, they justified their title by saying “we are particularly interested in the words of writers and speakers who have taken a self-conscious stand in opposition to male definition, defamation, and ignorance of women and their lives” (1985, p. 12). Their work carried the following definitions of brother: “A male who has a close relationship with another. A term which is not a symbol of universal human kinship, when it ignores generations of sisters.” By contrast sister is defined as “A term of affiliation used among girls and women.” On Love Potions: “The celebrated love potions of ancient texts may actually have been poisons: women’s last defense against patriarchal power.”

On Love Story: “The story of the pre-marital struggle.” Labia is defined as “Four lips protecting the inner sanctum of the female genitals.” As Jonathon Green observed in his historical survey of lexicographers:

“Headwords are very much drawn from an alternative lexicon; definitions are consciously oppositional to what is dismissed as the ‘male’ norm . . . They want quite specifically to produce something that is not the traditional ‘dick-tionary’ ” (1996, p. 377). More to the point, their tactical definitions clearly did not and still do not reflect current general usage, being more in the realm of semantic engineering based on ideological wish fulfillment than fact, designed as consciousness-raising strategies rather than descriptions. By this semantic strategy it is claimed that fellow and fathering are not male-specific. This is not so. However, in American usage at any rate, and without any obvious manipulation, two other established male terms have come into play: guy has come to be used sex-inclusively, as has parenting, coined about 1959.

Miller and Swift went further in their programmatic suggestions, quoting with approval the neologisms proposed by the US Department of Labor, such as charworker for charwoman, fisher for fisherman, sewer for seamstress, and so on. The New Fowler’s Modern English quoted Brigid Brophy’s review of “M & S (as she called them),” castigating their “leaden literalness of mind . . . their tin ear and insensibility to the metaphorical contents of language” (Burchfield 1996, p. 705).

Nonstandard coinages like wimmin (feminist term for woman, to exclude word man in it), herstory, and physically challenged were intended to draw attention to a particular issue, but have tended to provoke derisive hostility. However, in the case of wimmin it is important to place this seemingly modern coinage in historical context, since it is preceded by many folk etymologies playing on the supposed semantic link between woman and woe. The OED notes that usages “in the 16th and 17th centuries frequently play on a pseudo-etymological association with woe.”

Even the noted humanist Sir Thomas More could pun rather ponderously in 1534: “Man himselfe borne of a woman, is in deede a wo man, that is ful of wo and miserie.” John Ruskin preferred another pseudoetymology, since he “found pleasure in reminding the married women in his audience, that since wife means ‘she who weaves’, their place was in the home” (Potter, 1961, p. 106). (Skeat’s 1882 Etymological Dictionary was emphatic in its contradiction: “certainly not allied to weave&rdquo. Jane Mills’s Womanwords (1991) quotes a number of similar prejudicial instances. Citations for wimmin in the OED are as follows:

• 1979: “We have spelt it this way because we are not women neither are we female . . . ,” quoted in Kramarae and Treichler (1985).

• 1981: Used in association with the Greenham Wimmin who protestedat the American Air Force base at Greenham Common in Berkshire, England.

• 1982: “The War Against Wimmin,” Literary Review April 1992, parodying Marilyn French’s The War Against Women, reviewed in that issue.

The OED entry reveals both the successes and the dangers of publicity in four quotations from a few weeks in the year 1983: Observer March 13 on the Greenham Common women: “We want to spell women in a way that does not spell men”; Sunday Times April 10: “the eccentric re-spelling of words like ‘wimmin’ ”; Listener April 14: “Meanwhile, what of the Peace Women (‘wimmin’ in feminist placards)?”; Private Eye April 22: start of a satirical column headed Wimmin.

These feminist interventions showed two features which were to become common in the political correctness debate. The first was the assumption that meanings could be commandeered by pressure groups, and that verbal substitutions could be prescribed. Since historically the general trend of lexicography has been away from prescription (ruling what words are acceptable and what they should mean) in the direction of description (reflecting actual usage) this initiative is anachronistic and regressive. We shall see the process at work in the section on “Gender and Sexual Orientation” in chapter 6.

The second feature was the generally dogmatic attitude and acrimonious tone of the debate, in many ways a reflection of the hostility aroused by attempts at linguistic manipulation. “Reviewing the Random House Webster’s College Dictionary (1991), Time magazine (June 24, 1991) assailed its editors for their inclusion of such words as chairperson, herstory, humankind, and womyn, suggesting “that such catholicity failed to ‘protect English from the mindless assaults of the trendy’” (Green, 1996, p. 371). Collins English Dictionary (2003) includes chairperson, herstory, and humankind. Dinesh D’Souza has some comments on feminist manipulation of vocabulary in university courses (1991, p. 212).

...and that is how we came to: misogy noir and LatinX. lol These fruitckes just don't understand that not matter what language you use, reality does not care. Hence neurotics are nailed to the cross of their own fiction.

Case in point. Some dumbass intersectional black feminist though she can solve the world problems of RACISSSSM if only we add another word in the dictionary. lol

Imagine sitting there in the dark room one day and coming up with a term like; misogynoir . Bhuahaha!

Imagine the mental gymnastics one has to do to try to keep up with both reality and fiction of ever more contradicting world of intersctional feminism. One has to tie oneself into a mental pretzel every single day just to keep the fiction alive.

“Postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.” ― Jean Baudrillard

“Postmodernism, the school of "thought" that proclaimed "There are no truths, only interpretations" has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for "conversations" in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.” ― Daniel Dennett

“At the atomic level of the "New Liberalism/postmodernism" is a void of wilful ignorance surrounded by a nucleus of hypocrisy.” ― Dean Cavanagh, The Secret Life Of The Novel