11/13/2023 0 Comments Oxford dictionaries rabid![]() The phrases generated as likely usage examples will therefore mirror the most likely pairings or orderings of already existing words based on the semantically irrelevant factors of frequency and proximity. Just like the work I have been doing around the apparently sexist or racist stereotypical and offensive phrases which are often generated through Google Search and Autocomplete, it seems that the Oxford Dictionary’s examples are just a reflection of the (not always representative) linguistic data that exists online. Delving further into how examples might be generated, the Oxford Dictionary website explains how the phrases are drawn from ‘a vast bank of more than 1.9 million example sentences (around 38 million words) of real English, extracted from the world’s newspapers and magazines, academic journals, fiction, and blogs’. ![]() The word has the same origin as the disease Rabies:Įarly 17 th cent (in the sense ‘furious, madly violent’): from Latin rabidus, from rabere ‘to rave’)īut ignoring this questionable defence for a moment, what really interests me in terms of my research is that the Oxford Dictionary further defended their example by stating that ‘our example sentences come from real-world use and aren’t definitions’. Now I’m fairly certain I have never come across the word rabid used in a positive way. The argument appears to have started when one Twitter user noticed that the Oxford Dictionary’s usage example of the word ‘ rabid’ happens to be ‘ a rabid feminist’, and suggested the dictionary might like to change what could be perceived as a sexist example.īut instead of acknowledging the problem, Oxford Dictionary’s official Twitter account instead defended its example by claiming that ‘ rabid isn’t always negative’. However, I have just come across an interesting (and very heated) debate taking place on Twitter involving Oxford Dictionaries Online, the digital version of the Oxford Dictionary of English which (amongst other things) supplies Apple products with their built-in British-English dictionary. Oxford Dictionaries initially responded flippantly to Oman-Reagan, replying to his criticism of its choice of “rabid feminist” with the tweet: “If only there were a word to describe how strongly you felt about feminism …” and going on to say that: “Our point is that ‘rabid’ isn’t necessarily a negative adjective, and that example sentence needn’t be negative either … our example sentences come from real-world use and aren’t definitions.The work I have been doing around language in a digital age has mostly involved the algorithmic reproduction of language through search engines such as Google. ![]() Shouldn’t the usage examples in this dictionary reflect that understanding of sexism in language?”īuzzfeed uncovered further gendered definitions, with usage for the word “nurse” including “he was gradually nursed back to health”, and “she nursed at the hospital for 30 years”, while examples of usage for doctor all used the male pronoun. “As the Oxford Dictionary says in the usage example for ‘sexism’: ‘sexism in language is an offensive reminder of the way the culture sees women’. “Why does the Oxford Dictionary of English portray women as ‘rabid feminists’ with mysterious ‘psyches’ speaking in ‘shrill voices’ who can’t do research or hold a PhD but can do ‘all the housework’?” wrote the academic on Medium. An example sentence given for “housework” was “she still does all the housework”, while a sentence using the word “research” was illustrated with the sentence “he prefaces his study with a useful summary of his own researches”.
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