To be fair: their definition lacks a definition of what is male or female.
this post was submitted on 16 May 2025
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"Hope you're ready to define words, dictionary" that's their whole thing dude.
Also I would highly recommend anyone into anime to check out Fune wo Amu/The Great Passage. It's an anime about the creation of a dictionary. It's a pretty compelling love letter to the idea of language in general. I think I started watching it when it was airing thinking 'this sounds boring as hell, they've gotta be cooking something if this got funded' and they were.
Seconded on Fune Wo Amu.
If you are sick and tired of every single anime having the same Generic High School Protagonist, and not a single character over the age of 30, then Fune Wo Amu is a breath of fresh air as a show for adults that isn't afraid to deviate from the usual formula, and tell a different kind of story.
Merriam dgaf. Their job is to figure out what words people are using, and document them. People could invent the word "bumblesausagecock" and if it caught on, they would add it.
That would be such a bumblesausagecock thing to do
They definitely get bumblesausagecocked for doing that.
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Exactly. Dictionaries are descriptive tools, not prescriptive.
I generally agree, though there's cases where you want to be selective with what you're describing. This Low Saxon dictionary, for example, has a policy of not listing loans and calques from Dutch, German, or English unless they've been well-established, doubly so if there's an already existing Low Saxon word which fits the bill.
The justification is that the language is in a vulnerable state with native proficiency having jumped at least a full generation so many speakers' vocabulary is lacking. E.g. my repertoire of words for plants and animals in Low Saxon is negligible, so in speech I have to improvise i.e. use a loan. I occasionally look stuff up and I don't want to find the loan I just used listed, giving it dictionary blessing would amount to aiding and abetting the decline of the language. Why the hell would anyone want to aid and abet the sidelining of wonderful words like Huulbessen, "howl broom".
That exception makes sense. Both because their prescription isn't in the dictionary itself, but rather in their choice of scope for it, and because it's trying to protect a threatened variety, instead of just creating some meaningless division (like plenty prescriptions do).
variety
Language! High German may have an army but we have the fleet.
More seriously if you class Low Saxon as a non-standard variety of Standard German and then have a look at the family tree you'd have, for the sake of consistency, call English a German variety. Sure they're all West Germanic languages but we need taxa for the taxonomy god: Low Saxon is more closely related to the Anglo-Frisian languages than to the Allemannic/Bavarian line, which is where Standard German stems from.
"Variety" doesn't imply status as a dialect or as a language; it's neutral in this regard, that's why I used it.
More specifically, I see it as an Ingvaeonic variety; yes, like English, it's also an Ingvaeonic variety. I agree with you that "nesting" it within Standard German would be incorrect.
we need taxa for the taxonomy god
While this doesn't apply in this specific case, since Low Saxon is clearly sitting within its taxon, keep in mind that the taxonomy god is still Armok - it still demands blood. The blood of people furiously arguing if some variety belongs to taxon A or taxon B, when the variety shows intermediate traits.
I see this all the time when people talk about the Romance varieties, trying to lump Aragonese into either Ibero-Romance or Gallo-Romance; or Venetan into either Gallo-Italic or Italo-Dalmatian.
“Variety” doesn’t imply status as a dialect or as a language; it’s neutral in this regard, that’s why I used it.
I believe and forgive you.
The reason why I bristled is because there's a political dimension to the classification: The reason we have that generational gap in native proficiency is because the language was actively combatted, sidelined, and bemeaned by academia, "Low Saxon is an obstacle to education". Parents were made to believe that for their kids to have success, they needed to chide the grandparents for speaking it while the kids were around. In that effort, it was quite popular to class it as a dialect which goes contrary to the experience of speakers, flies in the face of more than a millennium of literary history, status as Lingua Franca, and much more. So for me, being neutral doesn't cut it: It diminishes the hard-won spark of self-esteem that's necessary to revitalise the language.
Also it's important to distinguish proper Low Saxon from Missingsch, the contact variety to Standard German. (Contemporary) Missigsch indeed is a dialect of Standard German, you can go full-tilt on its non-Standard features and Bavarians will still understand you.
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Putting words you don't know the meaning of in the dictionary accompanied by an explanation of what those words mean? Woke nonsense, obviously.
Dictionaries are - by definition - descriptive. It is not their duty to judge what goes into them. They merely collected terms used by people and explain what they mean.
Demanding to remove information from a dictionary, because you do not like what it expresses or the people who use those terms, is the very definition of censorship.
Dictionaries are - by definition - descriptive. It is not their duty to judge what goes into them. They merely collected terms used by people and explain what they mean.
Demanding to remove information from a dictionary, because you do not like what it expresses or the people who use those terms, is the very definition of censorship.
Aha! Who defined that? Big Dictionary, that's who.
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Also a very ham handed attempt to manipulate culture.
Or perhaps people who have had their culture manipulated running face first in to something outside their sphere and getting angry that it doesn’t comport with their manipulated understanding.
Dictionaries are - by definition - descriptive. It is not their duty to judge what goes into them. They merely collected terms used by people and explain what they mean.
You would get banned off a conservative subreddit for saying this.
Censorship isn't when we get rid of woke books like the dictionary dummy, censorship is when I don't get to say a slur without anyone getting mad at me.
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12000? It's over 20000! http://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/why-this-fungus-has-over-20-000-sexes
Sex is not the same in biology/science as it is in culture.
Sex in culture may be a choice, in biology it is a given. Sometimes a bad interpretation of facts.
Tfw a fungus has 20,000 times more sex than me
Sexuality as in who or what you are sexually attracted to, not sex in what kind of anatomy you have.
Sex is not the same in biology/science as it is in culture.
What do you mean? Why not?
Sex in culture may be a choice, in biology it is a given. Sometimes a bad interpretation of facts.
Are you talking about the act of sex? Bees can be considered to have 2 sexes but 3 genders, female bees are either a queen or a worker. Male bees are called drones. The female worker bees do not have sex.
If you mean genetic sex being a given, I'd bring up oxylotyls or the sex changes in frogs.
Sex is not a given in biology, it's very messy and complicated, maybe even more so than in human culture.
These people really don't have two braincells to rub together, do they?
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This is why the idea of gender needs to disappear eventually. If we have it, we then need to label every single permutation of every expression. Maybe that's fun for some people, but it's definitely not fun for me.
To be clear I'm not saying you can't be a woman or a man or whatever. I understand I have to pay that tax. But in 200 years maybe it won't matter anymore because we'll all just be people. And that seems nice to me.
Not really. Like with music, some labels are broader than others. “Oh you like rock? Rock & Roll, Glam Rock, Hard Rock, Metal?” “Oh what kind of Metal, Trash, Death, Symphonic.”
The broader terms existing does not negate the more precise terms and visa versa.
I think the broader argument tends to boil down to the fact that unlike music, which people can simply not engage in describing on a regular basis, gender expression is something that requires much more active participation by all members of a society, and that gender is not inherently separate from the rest of the human experience.
It's already hard enough for some people to remember names, now imagine having to remember which of any number of thousands of neopronouns each individual person you know uses, for example.
Contrast that with their "we'll all just be people" stance, which seems to just be a different wording of gender abolition, and you have a world where people simply express themselves as they are without having to increasingly sublabel.
It's like how while people can have long hair and short hair, wear dark clothes and light clothes, have blue/brown/green/gray/etc eyes, be introverted or extroverted, have a large or small social battery, or experience and display any number of different characteristics, while not having to actually label those characteristics in general conversation or identification.
They're simply traits within the human experience, but not traits that we have to outwardly label and display on a very frequent basis, unlike the way we usually talk about gender. This is especially important considering how every single human being experiences things even a little differently from one another, thus meaning that the number of sublabels is theoretically as large, if not larger than the current population of the earth.
I don't deny that the labels can still exist, and be useful to people, but I think gender is often treated as if it has to be some sort of mythical separate part of the brain, independent from all the other variations in human experience, and thus it must have a separate label at all times, even while we don't particularly care to label and identify with other characteristics that are also within the human experience, some of which have historically flowed between being considered very gendered or less/not gendered, such as assorted personality traits, length of hair, preferred social activities and groups, certain clothing, etc.
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That's like saying we need to get rid of all color names since there are so many hues and shades. What are chartreuse and fuchsia? Better just get rid of green and purple since there are so many colors.
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I really don't understand why anyone would get mad over any word being added to the dictionary unless the definition is obviously biased. I remember giggling at the profanity and racial slurs in the dictionary when I was a kid and nobody was upset about that as far as I know.
We have to understand that to the conservative mind, the very notion of "bias" doesn't make sense because it implies a relative difference between perspectives.
I say this also about the idea of conservative "punching down" in that to them, the concept is nonsense. They do not live in the same world we do. To them there is only "punching." If there's a threat, "punch" at it. They don't recognize or understand the idea of class or privilege, there is only "how I feel at this moment." And as depressing as it is to understand, it's literally the only thing they can grasp. Linear thinking.
We have a whole giant chunk of the population who have never been taught how to use language to reshape perspectives in their head, and as such, live in a linear world where there is only a "now" feeling and the means in which that feeling must be attacked or defended.
This is why it's utterly bonkers people keep trying to argue with them from a place of consistency, going "that's hypocritical!" like they even grasp it. They will say it back to you like it's just an insult, not what it represents. This is why you see them all saying the same buzzwords back at you. "You're the weird one!" "You're the nazi!" "You're the fascist!" they don't know or care what the words mean, it's punching and that's all that matters.
I strongly feel if we, all of us who have functional frontal lobes and language centers, understood this better we would be far better at shaping the public narrative and not making it worse by arguing nonsense they don't understand.
At least, it would have been but we let it go for too long and now they own the country and are pillaging our coffers and the next generation of kids is going to have even worse language skills and comprehension because they're going to be educated in churches and private schools that teach the importance of spirit and herbs and how the blacks started the civil war.
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I started reading this link for the lazy: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/genderqueer
And found this pretty darn good article for clueless but well-meaning people who want to learn and support their kid/grandkid/friend:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/merriam-websters-short-list-of-gender-and-identity-terms
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