![]() is off-putting to some people, we think it's worth it. As a subscriber to the feminist pop culture magazine Bitch from day one, I like their explanation: "While we're aware that the magazine's title. No one has yet done any studies about the correlation of vocabulary impoverishment and general lack of, um, smarts with people who use "bitch" as a pejorative.Ī few of the public uses of bitch are not only benign, but attempts to reclaim the word. Couldn't people just straighten up and fly right at work? "A number of courts around the country have grappled with the issue of whether, from a legal standpoint, referring to a female employee as a 'bitch' is defamatory or discriminatory." I would hope we don't have to take this issue to court. "In the workplace setting, the label of 'bitch' is often accompanied by inappropriate, demeaning behavior," says attorney Rebecca Palmer. Philosopher Mary Daly wrote that "bitch" is directed at women who are "active, direct, blunt, obnoxious, competent, loud-mouthed, independent, stubborn, demanding, achieving, overwhelming, lusty, strong-minded, scary, ambitious, tough, brassy, boisterous, turbulent, sprawling, strident, striding, and large (physically and/or psychically)."Īctually, when you study its use, you realize that a woman doesn't have to be anything but a woman to get called a bitch. It tells you only that, basically, the person using the term is probably really mad and thinks the subject doesn't deserve air. When someone says, "She's a real bitch," you have to ask: "What? What did she do? What do you mean?" The word tells you nothing informative about the woman. The problem with "bitch" is that it is, frankly, not a very good word, linguistically speaking. By all means let's insult people who have it coming to them without at the same time insulting women in general." ![]() The use of 'bitch,' 'bitchy,' and 'bitchin' ' is odious. 'Snarky,' 'malicious,' 'spiteful,' 'petty,' and 'egomaniacal' are just a few. Writer and editor Marie Shear says, "English offers a rich variety of adjectives with which to disparage people who bleepin' well deserve to be disparaged. Most of its public uses fall under the grammatical rubric "name calling by vocabulary-impoverished people in a hurry who also secretly hate women." But if you're interested, here's the skinny on "bitch." Having been called the language police, I want to say up front that I'm not telling anyone how to talk. "Don't Trust the B- in Apartment 23" (ABC) has triggered online discussions about the use of "bitch." I plan to update it to a newer version soon and that update should bring in a bunch of new word senses for many words (or more accurately, lemma).The author of the best seller "How to Say It" explores the use and meaning of a word front and center with a new ABC comedy. ![]() Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project (mentioned above), and express.js.Ĭurrently, this is based on a version of wiktionary which is a few years old. I simply extracted the Wiktionary entries and threw them into this interface! So it took a little more work than expected, but I'm happy I kept at it after the first couple of blunders. The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. That's when I stumbled across the UBY project - an amazing project which needs more recognition. However, after a day's work wrangling it into a database I realised that there were far too many errors (especially with the part-of-speech tagging) for it to be viable for Word Type.įinally, I went back to Wiktionary - which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it's not properly structured for parsing. This caused me to investigate the 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary - which is now in the public domain. ![]() I initially started with WordNet, but then realised that it was missing many types of words/lemma (determiners, pronouns, abbreviations, and many more). The dictionary is based on the amazing Wiktionary project by wikimedia. And since I already had a lot of the infrastructure in place from the other two sites, I figured it wouldn't be too much more work to get this up and running. I had an idea for a website that simply explains the word types of the words that you search for - just like a dictionary, but focussed on the part of speech of the words. Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. ![]() For those interested in a little info about this site: it's a side project that I developed while working on Describing Words and Related Words. ![]()
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