Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, February 4, 1993 TAG: 9302040022
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETTIJANE LEVINE LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A MANNER OF SPEAKING
LISTEN up. If you're not a narb (square) or an abb (abnormal), you'll want to speak the King's (oops, Monarch's) English in a politically correct, bias-free, po-mo (postmodern) way.You will not call your pooch a pet but an animal companion.
You will not call Whoopi Goldberg an actress; she's an actor. You will not say master bedroom, master key, mastermind or master anything - these are sexist concepts.
You will learn the meaning of flatline, TICKS, woopie, Glyph, mousemilking, diss and hundreds of other words and acronyms now in use but not yet common.
Above all, you will realize that no matter what you write or utter, it will most likely offend or confuse someone. Unless you're equipped with some of the new micro-dictionaries designed to guide you through a maze of language that is changing faster than we can learn it - and faster than traditional dictionaries can catalog.
New social movements and technologies have combined with heightened sensitivities to produce a soaring birth rate for new words and a dramatic shift in the use of old ones. And major dictionaries are revised about every 10 years - too infrequently to keep pace with the Mother (oops, parent) tongue, so this leaves lots of room for non-traditional lexicographers.
\ Item: Your morning paper has a story on the "critically dissed" Jackie Thomas show. Dissed? Webster's Dictionary, Third College Edition, 1988, won't define it. But "trash cash, fizzbos and flatliners - a dictionary of today's words" will. The book, due out next month, defines diss as a verb, from street slang, that means "to insult."
\ Item: You sweetly urge your 4-year-old to "say hello to the nice mailman" - only to realize that mailmen are not all male and you should have said . . . what?
Mail deliverer? Mailperson? Femailman?
Webster's, Page 815, lists mailman but no female equivalent. But "The Bias-free Word Finder - A Dictionary of Nondiscriminatory Language" offers mail carrier among half a dozen suitable alternatives.
\ Item: Your boss says the company is rightsizing and you must be decruited. What?? Go right to "The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook," which explains that rightsizing is the euphemism for downsizing - and when you're decruited, you're fired.
The authors of these small soft-cover dictionaries usually wear more than one hat.
Sid Lerner, for example, spent years as an ad agency creative director, until he came back from an island vacation in 1980 to find a new word: Abscam. It was in every paper, on every news report, yet there was no official place to look it up.
He realized that there were scores of such words - spawned in politics, computer sciences, medicine, ecology - each deserving acknowledgment and definition. So he compiled a dictionary that was so successful that he has since updated it twice.
His upcoming fourth volume, "trash cash . . . " (with co-author Gary S. Belkin and the editors of American Heritage dictionaries) contains what Lerner gleefully refers to as "1,200 virgin words found in no mainstream dictionaries."
One of his personal favorites is mousemilking, defined as the investment of maximum time and effort for minimum return. "It's a wonderful image," Belkin chortles. "Imagine how much effort you'd expend to milk a mouse - and how little you'd get back."
Also in the new edition are carjacking and glass ceiling, both in such common use that they already seem old.
Rosalie Maggio, who confides that she's been nicknamed "the word-Nazi," was a writer and editor in St. Paul, Minn., when she realized how many requests she was getting to "clean up sexist language" in other people's work.
"It was very time-consuming. I knew sexist words when I saw them but had no place to find alternatives that sounded right." So she wrote a dictionary of non-discriminatory language, "The Bias-Free Word Finder," with 5,000 entries and 15,000 alternatives.
If that sounds unnecessary, consider that news agencies, universities and all sorts of corporate entities find the sexist word problem so severe that many create their own lexicons of non-offending words so that staff members will not insult others in speech or writing.
The Smith College office of student affairs, for example, issued a language update that begins: "As groups of people realize they are oppressed . . . new words are created to express concepts that existing language cannot." Included in Smith's "new words" list is differently abled - to be used instead of handicapped.
Maggio is not impressed. She doesn't like euphemisms, such as physically challenged or differently abled. In a long section on the word handicapped, for example, she suggests person with a disability and other possible choices.
In general, she says, "language today cannot be unbiased and still be standard dictionary English. But we don't need to make up words or use contrived ones. I don't try to change the language; it's not a matter of change but a matter of choice. We just have to start making different choices of already existing words."
Maggio says it bothered her when the word person began to be attached to almost everything (i.e., fireperson) in an attempt to make language inclusive of women.
"It was a consciousness-raising effort, and so it served a purpose. But firefighter is a classic example of better word choice - it includes both sexes and is more vivid and descriptive. I wouldn't give you a nickel for mailperson, either. Mail carrier, which is inclusive, is far more precise."
Another of Maggio's pet peeves is "word pairs: actor/actress, poet/poetess - there are 60 or 70 sets of these in common usage," she says. "And historically, every time there's a male/female word pair, the female word gets discounted. Check your dictionary. A poet is one who writes poetry; A poetess is a female poet. . . . And which would you rather be," Maggio asks. "A governor or a governess? They used to have parallel meanings."
OK, so you think you knew all that and didn't need Maggio's lecture? Don't be too sure.
Chris Cerf, co-author with Henry Beard of "The Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook," says that although we may not realize it, we "are all speaking a new language, and it's almost impossible to avoid insulting people unless you carry a reference guide." He cites the case of Professor Roderick Nash of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
"Nash thought he knew it all, was up on everything. He knew the word pet has been replaced by animal companions. So he tried what he thought was a harmless little joke in his environmental ethics class. Would women who pose for Penthouse magazine prefer to be called Penthouse animal companions? he asked.
Guess what. Several members of the class answered with a formal sexual harassment complaint against Nash for his insensitivity. (The charge was dropped in 1991.)
"It could happen to anyone," Cerf says. His book - in its eighth U.S. printing and on best-seller lists in the United Kingdom - takes an ironic, literate, tongue-in-cheek approach to almost everything in the world of words.
From "ambigenic: a preferred substitute for the word non-sexist" to "Zulag and Animalcatraz as synonyms for zoo," Cerf scours the language of "words that are ageist, ethnocentric, Eurocentric, hegemonic, heterosexist, logocentric, lookist, patriarchal, phallocentric, racist, sizeist - or all of the above."
The book is dedicated to "the former Donna Ellen Cooperman, who, after a . . . courageous battle through the New York State court system, won the right to be known as Donna Ellen Cooperperson."
And that about says it all.