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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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.
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.
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.
down with big dic!
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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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These people really don't have two braincells to rub together, do they?
Most of the time they're just lying about things like this.
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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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"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.
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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12000? It's over 20000! https://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.
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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 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.
Hey it is me JD Vance, I was and still am upset, kids giggling reminds me other people experience joy and love and then I start to feel like an empty monster.
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I started reading this link for the lazy: https://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:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/merriam-websters-short-list-of-gender-and-identity-terms
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I found a HuffPo article linking to the original Twitter post (link to bad place) in case anyone wanted to verify this was legit before sharing.
You can change any x link to xcancel to be able to view the content without giving musk the traffic stats: https://xcancel.com/MerriamWebster/status/724645568014868480
Now I love you even more Merriam Webster<3
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