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LHMP #450g Turton 2024 Before the Word Was Queer Conclusion


Full citation: 

Turton, Stephen. 2024. Before the Word Was Queer: Sexuality and the English Dictionary 1600-1930. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 978-1-316-51873-1

Publication summary: 

A study of the handling of transgressive sexuality in English dictionaries over the centuries.

Conclusion

* * *

This section discusses other dictionaries contemporary with or subsequent to the publication of the OED, and the ways in which they were indebted to it. This debt included reproducing some of its deficiencies.

But a new generation of dictionaries recognized the exclusion of the language of marginalized communities. The use of electronic corpus data revolutionized the ability to identify and include citations, reducing some of the bias inherent in funneling the editorial process through specific individual editors. Corpus data, however, adds a new veneer of objectivity onto a majoritarian approach that still has the tendency to erase or overlook word senses specific to minority communities.

The conflict between dictionaries as descriptive versus prescriptive continued, as compilers questioned the appropriateness of accepting words considered to be slang or not yet established in the lexicon. For example, in the 1970s, dictionary editors could still debate whether “gay” should be added as an acceptable formal equivalent for “homosexual.”

But the shift to electronic/online editions of dictionaries made the process of updating easier and more rapid.

Crowd-sourced dictionaries such as Wiktionary give marginalized communities more theoretical input, but de facto biases in the volunteer editors still affect the result. Crowd-sourcing can also open the potential for trolling and abusive content, particularly seen in the Urban Dictionary.

The presumption of authority given to the OED can result in users giving deference to its gaps and flaws, even in the face of counter-evidence. Hence the persistence of the claim that there was no identifiable lesbian identity in English until the 1920s, despite clear evidence of vocabulary for f/f sex in the 18th century and earlier. (The OED 3rd edition has corrected these omissions, but the myth of “no word for lesbian before the sexologists” persists in both formal and informal discussion. [Note: I regularly find myself countering this myth in social media spaces to this day.]

Further citations for queer vocabulary could be included if dictionaries expanded to include private correspondence among queer communities, where words are often well established long before they make their way into published material. This method could help fill in apparent discontinuities, such as the gap in OED citations for sapphic/sapphist between 1900 and 1933. Current citation sources also result in a bias toward male authors in citations for f/f terms, which in turn can result in a bias toward negative contexts.

This chapter ends with a summing up of the relevance of lexicography to studying queer history.

There are two appendices. The first is a transcript of Anne Lister’s hand-compiled glossary of sexual vocabulary. The second is a table, organized by headword, of the queer vocabulary in the dictionaries studied for this book.

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