Sexism and, perhaps, prescriptivism in English

[Richard]

There's an interesting article on sexism in English (especially in terms of words referring to women becoming more negative over time) at http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... h-language
(The comments are also worth skimming.)

A prescriptivist issue is whether the Oxford Dictionary should change its example of how to use 'rabid' from 'feminist' to a different word (for reasons of political correctness). 'rabid feminist' appears once in the BNC, as does 'rabid anti-royalist' and 'rabid right-wing'. Is replacing 'feminist' with one of these other examples justifiable?

[sgtowns]

This is quite the controversial article, as can be seen in the comments section. But from an academic perspective, it's too bad the author chose such a weak citation to back up the idea that words referring to women undergo more pejorative change than those referring to men. Here's what you get when you click through to the quote from the linguist:

"... words pertaining to women undergo pejoration far more frequently than do words pertaining to men. Consider a brief list of words for men and women which were once entirely parallel..."

This is cherry-picking at its finest. Show me some numbers if you want to convince me. (Ahh.. my quantitative biases are coming out again!)

In any case, it is my own personal opinion that a dictionary should reflect usage, not the editor's opinion or political stance. So in this case, "rabid feminist" seems like an odd choice. According to COCA we have frequency counts for 1-word collocations with "rabid" as follows:

rabid fans 31
rabid nationalism 6
rabid ideologues 4
rabid anti-american 4
rabid nationalists 3
rabid partisan 3
rabid enthusiasm 3
rabid anti-catholic 2
rabid anti-communist 2
rabid consumerism 2
rabid environmentalist 2
etc....

And just 1 about "rabid feminist"

So in my opinion, "rabid fans" seem to be the best choice by far. But if "rabid feminist" was the most common usage, then that is what they should list.

[Richard]

Words following 'rabid' seem to fall into three main categories (ignoring oddities like 'rabid peanut-shipping' which are highlighted if you sequence by relevance and remove the minimum frequency requirement):
1. Animals (especially dogs and bats)
2. Fans (and supporters)
3. Political viewpoints (ideologues, extremists, capitalists, anti-capitalists, feminists etc.)

These three categories, to me, seem to collocate with different meanings of 'rabid' (literal meaning of having rabies, metaphorical meaning concerning behaviour, metaphorical meaning of extreme). Therefore, examples from all three should be included in a dictionary. For meanings 1 and 2, the choice of collocates to show is fairly straightforward since one collocate dominates and a second is also fairly frequent; after that, frequencies of other collocates are low. For meaning 3, the choice is more difficult since there are numerous examples, all of which are fairly rare. You might select 2 or 3 to represent different sub-categories under category 3 (e.g. 'right-wing' for politics, 'feminists' for social issues); you might want to select examples which are likely to be clear to readers (e.g. don't select 'trot' [short for Trotskyite] since this is obscure). Under these conditions 'feminists' might be selected. Deciding not to select 'feminists' for political correctness reasons would mean that you would have to select another political word, the supporters of which could also criticise your choice as showing bias.

I'm not saying that 'feminists' should be included as an example collocate, but I can see why a dictionary compiler would do so, even though the frequency of collocation is not very high.

[sgtowns]

Words following 'rabid' seem to fall into three main categories (ignoring oddities like 'rabid peanut-shipping' which are highlighted if you sequence by relevance and remove the minimum frequency requirement):
1. Animals (especially dogs and bats)
2. Fans (and supporters)
3. Political viewpoints (ideologues, extremists, capitalists, anti-capitalists, feminists etc.)

But aren't feminists fans and supporters of something (feminism)? Perhaps we could break it up into three groups as:

1. Diseased animals
2. Fans and Supporters of groups or ideas (rabid nationalist)
3. Extreme ideas/viewpoints (rabid nationalism)

But I don't know if "rabid person" is a big enough difference from "rabid idea" to warrant its own entry. My version of the New Oxford American Dictionary groups #2 and #3 into "having or proceeding from an extreme or fanatical support of or belief in something: a rabid feminist."

And to think that discussions like these probably happen on each of the thousands of words in a dictionary. Now, let's take a moment to be glad that we are not dictionary editors...

In any case, it seems like the usage of rabid referring to diseased animals is much more common these days, at least according to COCA as seen in my previous post. It's interesting though that the original meaning of "rabid" is "raging, furious, enraged" from 1610s while the meaning for the disease only shows up in 1831 (etymonline.com). Perhaps this is a job for Google N-Grams. (Please click over to the other thread now )