Reflecting on the recent changes in language

[Ingenieur]

I stumbled across a hard copy of a dictionary from the early 90s recently and thought I'd take the opportunity to reflect on quite how recent a lot of the changes are in the discourse surrounding sex and feminism.

My hope is that this will serve as something of a record of what was understood to be the meaning of words in the living adult memory of most of those who use this board, as recently as 30 years ago.

Dictionaries of course aren't necessarily definitive, they record current and historic usage, but they are referenced when laws are drafted and determined in courts so having an appreciation of what was meant when laws were written is useful. Also, it is a snapshot of language at a given time so one can track when new usage appears.

It is clear from the screenshots that woman/ man, female/ male until this point had only sex-based meanings. Gender too had none of the social and cultural meanings we ascribe to it today - it was a grammatical term, or a reference to one's sex in the last entry.

Interestingly, in the entry for "sex change" it accurately refers to it as an "apparent change of sex", which of course it is.

Anyway, feel free to peruse the definitions, see which ones are listed as "archaic" and which ones deserve to be, and let's wonder at how such stable definitions because mangled in a single generation.

Stand down. Deborah Cameron already did the research.

https://debuk.wordpress.com/2016/12/15/a-brief-history-of-gender/

I’m interested in the difference between the definitions of woman and man. Adult human female was the first definition for woman, whereas man was not adult human male, but had a much wider meaning, broadly relating to mankind, I suppose.

That feels very non-specific, as if men don’t really have a definition of themselves as individuals.

But it also is a perfect demonstration of the inequality of regard for the different sexes and how, only a short time ago, women were the aberrant humans who needed a separate definition, and that we moved almost seamlessly from that position to another, where women are described as non-men and where we can have no definition of our own as some men are now insisting they must be a part of womanhood.

@HammockFullOfRats

Thank you, those are excellent.

It just shows how stable those non-recent definitions have been historically.

Perhaps she did, Lurk, but without this thread, I wouldn't have been prompted to flick through the 1934 addenda to the Concise Oxford and discover that the word "undergraduette" once existed to a great enough extent to justify a place in a bookshelf reference.

A quick Google of current bank application forms in the UK shows "gender" being used to mean sex, to the present day.

Undergraduette is hilarious.

I haven't heard 'sex kitten' for decades.

Thanks @BackToLurk

That seems to align with my understanding of the historical change in usage.

Interestingly, the quotation the author references as the first evidence of the use of gender as a social construct, namely "the socialized obverse of sex" in 1945, comes from I. Madison Bailey (Formerly Isaac Madison Bailey, then Madison Bailey following transition).

So the sex/ gender distinction does seem to have come from queer theorists first, rather than feminists as I'd expected.

PriOn there used to be a separate word for man in Old English, if you really wanted to specify male person — wer (as in werewolf). "Man" just meant person (which also in practice might've usually meant male person, but, well, yeah).

"Wif" meant woman (not just wife), as in midwife (i.e. with-woman). Wif became wifmann (meaning woman-person) which eventually developed into woman.

For some reason men lost "wer" (and also lost waepnedmann i.e. weaponed-person i.e. penis-person) and ended up just getting called men i.e. people.

@HammockFullOfRats

There used to be a separate word for man in Old English

Just to add to this @PriOn1, it also depends on the presentation style of the dictionary. Some use the most frequently-used definition first, others (as I understand the OCD does) lists the first-attested definition first, with more recent uses coming later.

Yes, undergraduette is a wonderfully archaic construction, it definitely gave me a smile!