As editor of the Macquarie Dictionary, I picture myself as the woman with the mop and broom and bucket cleaning the language off the floor after the party is over. And in this case it was quite a party.
Could this take some of the heat out of the issue? Probably not… Cartoon: Bill Leak
But what it left on the floor was misogyny – with a new meaning. The established meaning of misogyny is ‘hatred of women” but this is a rarefied term that goes back to the 1600s in English that acquired the status of a psychological term in the late 1800s when its counterpart misandry was coined. Both terms refer to pathological hatreds.
Since the 1980s misogyny has come to be used as a synonym for sexism – a synonym with bite but nevertheless with the meaning of ‘entrenched prejudice against women’ rather than ‘pathological hatred of women’.
It seems to be used for an underlying frame of mind or an attitude of which sexism is the outward form, displayed in language, discriminating policies, workplace injustices, etc.
The recent debate brought this to the attention of the Macquarie Dictionary editors. The extended meaning was not created in that debate, just made highly visible by it. We felt the need to keep the record of the language up to date, and to adjust the entry at misogyny to cover its current use.
There is some history to this in the U.S. Hilary Clinton complained of misogyny directed towards her in her campaign against Barack Obama. A debate similar to the one we have had in Australia followed that remark and came to the same conclusion, that misogyny had developed a second meaning.
I guess that this is another instance of Australian English following American English - in the context of feminist debate that seems highly likely.
The Oxford English Dictionary online adjusted its definition of the word in 2002 by adding ‘dislike of or prejudice against women’ to the existing definition ‘hatred of women’. I have chosen in the Macquarie Dictionary to give two separate meanings for the word. It seems awkward to toss in hatred and prejudice as definitional bedfellows. They don’t mean the same thing.
It is not the case that Julia Gillard stretched the word to take in this new meaning as a personal flight of fancy. The word misogyny had acquired this second meaning in the 1980s and had been used generally in this way.
Of course I cannot say what was in Ms Gillard’s mind - definition 1 or definition 2 - but I think that it is extremely likely that she was using the word with the meaning that it currently has in feminist discourse.
Nor is the case that Macquarie Dictionary has experienced any pressure to add the second definition. There have been suggestions that politicians may have been contacting us to push a point of view but in reality the dictionary follows the action, it does not instigate or become a party to the action.
There is a belief that as editor I can do whatever I like with the dictionary but that is not true. I am constrained by the evidence for the use of a word which must be there to justify inclusion.
As we live our dictionary lives we are alerted to new words and new meanings in a whole variety of sources. It doesn’t matter what the starting point is. Once a word is up for consideration we need to assess whether there is evidence for the use of this word in the language community.
It can’t be one person’s word or a mistake or a private invention or an attempt to twist a meaning for devious reasons. There was plenty of evidence for the use of misogyny in the sense of ‘prejudice’ as opposed to ‘pathological hatred’ and so, on the basis of that evidence, we added the second definition. The first definition remains so it is not that we have scrapped that meaning, just that we have added a second meaning.
I seem to have unwittingly invited everyone to the afterparty at the dictionary – the hubbub of voices arguing for and against the new definition is tremendous. None of this debate is relevant to the dictionary which attempts, by using hard evidence, to remain an impartial record of the English language as it lives and breathes in the Australian English language community.
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