"Hi, I’m Barbara Ann Kipfer, PhD., editor and compiler of
Roget’s New Millenium Thesaurus. The synonym “weaker sex” appears in many
thesauruses for terms like woman, lady, and female. It is considered an
informal, possibly derogatory, synonym for those words. Due to the way our
search technology works, a search for weaker appeared to suggest that it was a
synonym for female and lady. This was incorrect and has been fixed.
We take
your concerns about language and society seriously (this is, after all, our
business) and after reading feedback on the entries for
female and
lady, we carefully
reviewed our editorial decisions. In light of how our customers use
Thesaurus.com on a daily basis, we chose to remove “weaker sex” as a
informal/slang synonym from our site. The entries now describe current American
English usage more accurately and we feel we’re providing more helpful
suggestions for those seeking guidance on word choice from us.
We apologize
for any confusion this situation may have caused and hope you’ll stay in touch
with us as we strive to improve all the learning resources we provide on
Thesaurus.com, Dictionary.com and Reference.com."
How crazy is this? Enough people complained such that http://www.lexico.com/ has issued the following apology on its website regarding synonyms for the word "weaker"... check it out below and at: http://www.lexico.com/blog/2008/04/09/addressing-our-weaknesses/:
2 comments:
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