cindym@azure.UUCP (Cindy McMeekin) (12/14/83)
My, my, haven't I caused a controversy. I have never seen my name in print that many times. Even called a radical, heavens. You'll note that this is not an apology. Cindy McMeekin tektronix!tekmdp!cindym
saquigley@watdaisy.UUCP (Sophie Quigley) (12/18/83)
I do not think that looking in dictionaries for the meaning of the words "boy" or "girl" is very relevant to this discussion, as most dictionaries have been written by men and are therefore written from a man's point of view of the world. Before the flaming starts, let me add that this is not a criticism (although some of what will follow is), but just a remark. I do not believe that there is such a thing as objectivity, and find it comple- tely natural that dictionaries end up with the biases of their authors. Maybe "girl" is an "accepted" term for young unmarried women, but "accepted" by who? certainly not by me or by quite a few women I know! and I think we certainly have a say about what we like to be called and think we should be called. Dictionaries are not gospels containing the *T*R*U*T*H*, but simply records of the current state of a language in a society. I believe that writers of dictionaries honestly try to make this record as accurate as possible, and they are doing a pretty good job of it; It must however be realised that societies and languages evolve and that we have control on that evolution. This is why this discussion is going on. Some women object to being called "girls" because of the connotations of this term; when people will have objected enough, the usage will eventually become obsolete, and dictionaries will list it but as archaic (obsolete, rare, slang, vulgar, or not at all, who knows..). Now for those who do not believe that dictionaries are biased, here are a few counterexamples, but first the story on how I discovered them. For the last few years, I have been buying dictionaries right and left, and not knowing how to go about doing such a thing decided to opt for the following solution: pick a few dictionaries which are about the same size, and have about the same number of words, open one of them at random, then locate the equivalent page on all the others, and compare the different definitions of the same word. After doing this for a few pages, one quickly notices which dictionaries one prefers. Anyway, throughout this shopping spree, I had been avoiding "dirty" words, because I thought that looking at them is a pretty immature thing to do and that anyway, with our past history of shame about sexuality, dictionaries are probably pretty careful nowadays about definitions of sexual terms and try not to be biased about it, right? WRONG!! when I finally stumbled on the word "lesbian" in my Houghton Mifflin Canadian Dictionary, which I had liked so far, here's what I found: noun: 1-a native or resident of Lesbos, 2-The ancient Greek dialect of Lesbos ... adjective: 1-Of or relating to Lesbos and its people, 2-Of or relating to the ancient dialect of Lesbos. 3-Of or characteristic of Sappho and her poetry. That's it Folks! My next though was, "how foolish! I bought a dictionary without sex words", so I checked up a few others; well, I found to my surprise, that the words "homosexual", "homosexuality", "gay" (as in homosexual) were defined. I quickly checked all my less obscure dictionaries for all the sexual terms I could think of to compare their definitions. I was quite satified with most of them except for the following definitions in "Le Petit Robert", one of the most respected french dictionaries: Fellation: Acte sexuel consistant a exciter les parties genitales masculines par des caresses bucales. which translates to Fellatio: sexual act which consists in exciting the male genitals by mouth caresses. (sounds like fun doesn't it?) Cunnilingus: Pratique sexuelle qui met la bouche au contact des parties genitales feminines. i.e Cunnilingus: sexual practice which puts the mouth into contact with the feminine genitals. So much for caresses and excitment!