Rabid feminists, fans and rightwingers
The Oxford Dictionary (the default dictionary on Mac OSX) has been accused of sexism in the examples it provides to illustrate how words are used. The debate focused on its definition of rabid: 1. having or proceeding from an extreme or fanatical support of or belief in something: a rabid feminist. 2. (of an animal) affected with rabies. her mother was bitten by a rabid dog. Why this example? Why portray feminists as rabid?
Apparently, the Oxford Dictionary first ridiculed the critique, but later issued a statement:
We apologise for the offence that these comments caused. The example sentences we use are taken from a huge variety of different sources and do not represent the views or opinions of Oxford University Press. That said, we are now reviewing the example sentence for «rabid» to ensure that it reflects current usage.
«In other words, it’s not the dictionary that’s sexist, it’s the English-speaking world», David Shariatmadari commented in the Guardian. He adds a warning that the review the dictionary plans to do may well find that rabid in fact does occur more often in combination with feminist than with other words (especially if online discussions are included). Even so, the dictionary cannot simply hide behind a word count - they’re still responsible for the editorial choices they make.
And how about the Guardian itself? The table below lists the words that appear most frequently after rabid in Guardian articles since 1999. The words have been stemmed so as to lump together terms like racist and racists.
term | count |
---|---|
dog | 136 |
anti | 86 |
fan | 63 |
right | 33 |
support | 21 |
nationalist | 18 |
anim | 15 |
press | 14 |
rightwing | 14 |
tori | 13 |
republican | 13 |
fanbas | 13 |
rightw | 12 |
puppi | 11 |
follow | 10 |
critic | 9 |
antisemit | 9 |
nation | 9 |
racist | 9 |
bat | 9 |
feminist | 9 |
crowd | 9 |
home | 9 |
The term anti deserves a separate analysis. The table below lists the most frequent words matching the pattern rabid anti[\s|\-]([a-z]+)
, again reduced to their stem.
term | count |
---|---|
semit | 11 |
european | 10 |
communist | 9 |
Terms like dog, anim[al] and bat obviously have to do with the second meaning of the term rabid (affected with rabies). Other than that, it’s clear that rabid is far more often used in combination with fan or rightwing than feminist. At least so in the Guardian.
Method
I simply adapted the code I wrote earlier to analyse use of the term illegal in the Guardian and the New York Times.