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
A study of the handling of transgressive sexuality in English dictionaries over the centuries.
Chapter 5 – Taxonomizing Desire
* * *
This chapter focuses on the philosophy, history, and development of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) specifically. The creation of the OED was a monumental project, delivered alphabetically in fascicles (separate installments of a larger work, meant to be bound into a single volume when complete). The fascicles were released beginning in the 1880s and completed in 1928, followed by a supplement in 1933 to catch up with developments in the previous half century.
The editors touted it as the “supreme development” of lexicography, “permeated…through and through with the scientific method.” This “scientific method” referred to use of historic data to trace the emergence and development of words and meanings. The process included massive numbers of volunteers identifying and contributing quotations from written sources to assist in creating the histories of words. However, like science itself, this method was deeply rooted in the Anglocentric and male-centered biases of its (white, male, English) editors. In addition to racial and gender biases, they carried over the mission of imposing a particular view of sexual morality on the contents.
The censoring of “bad words” was challenged by reviewers even at the beginning of the project, but the effect was not entirely due to editorial choice. A slang dictionary published in the 1890s unsuccessfully sued a printer for refusing to typeset the book, due to the “indecent” language it contained, but the courts determined that there was no inherent right to publish indecent language. This had a chilling effect even on the authors of scientific works.
Sexual matters, including same-sex acts, were a subject of popular and legislative interest during the period when the OED fascicles were being released. High profile legal cases such as the Wilde and Asquith trials and controversies over literary works by Swinburne and Hall placed this “indecent” vocabulary in the public record even as it was being refused a place in the dictionary.
Despite this censorship, the OED contained much more same-sex vocabulary than any previous dictionary. But even in terms of reproducing same-sex vocabulary present in earlier dictionaries, the OED is spotty. And sexual senses of words like “lesbian” were omitted, despite clear examples of usage in earlier works. As in earlier dictionaries, definitions were obscured and made vague, with references to “lewdness” or “unnatural lust” without specifying details. Tracing cross-references of words used in definitions, such as “copulation,” continued to provide circular and dead-end paths, due to heteronormativity. Another deliberate deficiency was the omission of citation quotations for specific senses of sexual vocabulary, or the source of a citation might be given, but not the text itself. For example, the OED’s working notes included a citation for “tribadism” from an edition of the 1001 Nights that had a neutral/positive tone, but this was in conflict with the negative definition it would have been attached to, and so was omitted.
In general, citations for f/f sex are drawn from medical and legal texts rather than literature and non-professional genres. This contributed to the continuing tradition of displacing the concrete specifics of f/f sex into other places and times.
The next section of this chapter explores the publications of sexologists as a source of neologisms for same-sex topics. The publication of sexology texts met with many of the same moral objections and barriers that explicit dictionaries (such as slang dictionaries) did. This new sexual vocabulary was, in general, not included in the original edition of the OED, thus omitting “homosexual” and “inversion” (in a gender/sexual sense). The OED became more open to such vocabulary as time passed, resulting in greater inclusion of sexual vocabulary toward the end of the alphabet.
The 1933 supplement to the OED had as its stated mission to include words and senses that had emerged in the previous half century. Thus the supplement added words such as “masochist” and “pervert” but continued to exclude others, notably “lesbian” and “lesbianism”—an exclusion that was protested (in vain) at the time.
Drafts of definitions show the ongoing battle between those trying to impose moral judgements on the sexologists’ vocabulary and those working to retain their less judgmental medical senses. (There is much more discussion of the definitions of same-sex vocabulary within the writings of the sexologists themselves.)
The next section of the chapter looks at how queer writers and communities created new senses of existing words, such as the common use by female couples of the language of marriage, the specially emphasized use of “friend” by female couples, etc. However the preference of the OED for published sources rather than private correspondence made it highly unlikely that such senses would be considered for inclusion.
Add new comment