What it means to be in a war of words
AS EDITOR of the Macquarie Dictionary, I picture myself as the woman with the mop and bucket cleaning the language off the floor after the party is over. And in this case it was quite a party.
Could this take some of the heat out of the issue? But what it left on the floor was misogyny — with a new meaning.
The established meaning of misogyny is ‘‘hatred of women’’. But this is a rarefied term that in English goes back to the 1600s, and that acquired the status of a psychological term in the late 1800s when its counterpart, misandry, was coined. Both refer to pathological hatreds.
Since the 1980s, misogyny has come to be used as a synonym for sexism — a synonym with bite, but nevertheless with the meaning of entrenched prejudice against women rather than a pathological hatred of women. It seems to be used for an underlying frame of mind, or an attitude, of which sexism is the outward form and that is displayed in language, discriminating policies, workplace injustices, etc.
The recent debate brought this to the attention of the Macquarie Dictionary editors. The extended meaning was not created in that debate, but was just made highly visible by it.
We felt the need to keep the record of the language up to date, and to adjust the misogyny entry to cover its current use.
The Oxford English Dictionary online adjusted its definition of the word in 2002 by adding ‘‘dislike of or prejudice against women’’ to the existing definition of ‘‘hatred of women’’.
In the Macquarie Dictionary, I chose to give two separate meanings for the word. It seems awkward to toss in hatred and preju- dice as definitional bedfellows. They don’t mean the same thing.
It is not the case that Julia Gillard stretched the word to take in this new meaning as a personal flight of fancy. Misogyny acquired this second meaning in the 1980s and had been used generally in this way.
Of course, I cannot say what was in Ms Gillard’s mind— definition 1 or definition 2 — but I think it extremely likely she was using the word with the meaning that it currently has in feminist discourse.
Nor is it the case that Macquarie Dictionary has experienced any pressure to add the second definition. There have been suggestions that politicians may have been contacting us to push a point of view. But in reality, the dictionary follows the action; it does not instigate or become a party to the action.
There is a belief that, as editor, I can do whatever I like with the dictionary. But that is not true.
I am constrained by the evidence for the use of a word, which must be there to justify inclusion.
As we live our dictionary lives, we are alerted to new words and new meanings in a whole variety of sources. It doesn’t matter what the starting point is. Once a word is up for consideration, we need to assess whether there is evidence for the use of this word.
There was plenty of evidence for the use of misogyny in the sense of prejudice as opposed to pathological hatred. And so, on the basis of that evidence, we added the second definition. The first definition remains, so it is not that we have scrapped that meaning. It’s just that we have added a second meaning.
I seem to have unwittingly invited everyone to the after-party at the dictionary — the hubbub of voices arguing for and against the new definition is tremendous.
None of this debate is relevant to the dictionary, which attempts, by using hard evidence, to remain an impartial record of the English language as it lives and breathes in Australia.