By Andrea Widburg
There has always been a political element to dictionaries. After all, as George Orwell explained when he created Newspeak, he who controls language controls thought. That’s why it shouldn’t be surprising that the people behind the online Cambridge Dictionary have decided to include fake genders in the definitions of “man” and “woman.” Once again, the intellectual spawns of academia are spreading the rot.
Dictionaries have guided the English language since the mid-18th century when Samuel Johnson published his ground-breaking Dictionary of the English Language. It was, he explained, intended to standardize and rationalize spelling, trace word originals, give pronunciation guidance and “preserve the purity, and ascertain the meaning of our English idiom.”
Noah Webster, who wrote the first uniquely American dictionary in the first quarter of the 19th century, had even higher aspirations: Refining the English language would elevate the American people by recognizing the virtues of theirunique take on the English language, as well as helping them understand the virtues of American nationalism and religious morality.
Johnson and Webster intuitively understood that language, thought, and even national identity are inexorably intertwined. No wonder, then, that the battle over language in America is constant, something that’s escalated over the years.
For example, one of those battles is the way everything Republicans and conservatives do or say is characterized as “racism.” “Racism” meant imputing negative characteristics to people based on race. In leftist hands, though, racism means “anything we don’t like.” When Obama became president, leftists effectively used that redefined word to silence those who foolishly still viewed “racism” as a moral failing tied to racial hatred.
Times have changed, though. Both Obama (Black) and Trump (falsely accused of being a “racist”) are gone from office, and Biden (a genuine racist) is occupying the White House. That makes the racist charge troublesome. Therefore, the left has seamlessly moved to using so-called “gender identity” as its tool for social and political control. The same gender ascendency is playing out across the West.
That’s why it shouldn’t surprise us that the Cambridge Dictionary, a product of the venerable Cambridge University Press, is redefining the words “man” and “woman,” both of which lie at the heart of the movement to elevate a mental illness to a central cultural and political reality. To that end, the Cambridge Dictionary includes the following as part of its definition of the word man:
an adult who lives and identifies as male though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth:
- Mark is a trans man (= a man who was said to be female when they were born).
- Their doctor encouraged them to live as a man for a while before undergoing surgical transition.
It includes the same nonsense for the word “woman”:
an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth:
I haven’t researched it, but I would assume that, if we asked the people who changed the definitions why they did so, they would say that they are simply reflecting how language is used. If they said that, they’re lying.
That’s because they left out of the definition the words “delusional,” “mental illness,” or other signifiers that the transgender movement is the product of mass hysteria and mental illness. Without that information, they put the dictionary’s imprimatur on so-called “transgenderism” as something that actually exists: That is, that people’s biological reality is fake and that surgery, dangerous pharmaceuticals, and brute force societal pressure can magically turn people into something they never were and never can be.
Every pernicious idea in the Western world today goes back to a toxic amalgam of Marxism and post-modernism, all steeped together in academia and then funneled back into society via indoctrinated graduates who populate the corporate, media, and entertainment worlds. Therefore, it shouldn’t surprise us that a dictionary that is the product of an academic-based corporation should push sexual Newspeak on society—yet somehow, it still does. No matter how far we fall, these institutions continuously remind us that we still have a long way to go before we hit bottom.