Community Rules
You must post before you leave
Be nice. Assume others have good intent (within reason).
Block or ignore posts, comments, and users that irritate you in some way rather than engaging. Report if they are actually breaking community rules.
Use content warnings and/or mark as NSFW when appropriate. Most posts with content warnings likely need to be marked NSFW.
Most 196 posts are memes, shitposts, cute images, or even just recent things that happened, etc. There is no real theme, but try to avoid posts that are very inflammatory, offensive, very low quality, or very "off topic".
Bigotry is not allowed, this includes (but is not limited to): Homophobia, Transphobia, Racism, Sexism, Abelism, Classism, or discrimination based on things like Ethnicity, Nationality, Language, or Religion.
Avoid shilling for corporations, posting advertisements, or promoting exploitation of workers.
Proselytization, support, or defense of authoritarianism is not welcome. This includes but is not limited to: imperialism, nationalism, genocide denial, ethnic or racial supremacy, fascism, Nazism, Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, etc.
Avoid AI generated content.
Avoid misinformation.
Avoid incomprehensible posts.
No threats or personal attacks.
No spam.
Moderator Guidelines
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.
down with big dic!
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.
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.
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.
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".
"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.
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.
Actually no, that's not what they said. They said sure you can have green, but not everything has to be green, blue, or red.
Also, purple is a lie.
I think it's awfully optimistic of you to think 200 years would be enough to erase gender bias even if most of society went into it with good intentions. Categorizing is too deep an instinct. It's easier for most people to add categories to the 2 most of us were taught as infants than to erase the concept entirely.
I suppose you could use they/them for everyone, to acknowledge the othergender aspects of them that may not be apparent or recognized by anyone including themselves.
But you'd piss a lot of people off.
Then again, that might be a good thing.
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.
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.
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.
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
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