Zonked by a Ms.

A woman updates Roget's

What is a woman? A "petticoat, skirt, moll, broad," according to one recent U.S. edition of Roget's Thesaurus. Also "the fair sex, girlie, distaff side, Venus, nymph, wench, grisette and bit of fluff." Such archaisms have a kind of antique charm for veteran Rogetophiles, but new times demand new stereotypes. Accordingly, the British publishing firm of Longman advertised in the London Times Educational Supplement for an editor to update its standard 1962 version of Roget's. The result, out last month after more than three years of work, brought some shocked reviews. Cried the London Sunday Times in a headline: ROGET is ZONKED BY A MODERN MS.

The zonker is Susan Lloyd, 41, onetime librarian and modern-language teacher, who answered the Longman advertisement and got the job. Her main task was to update Roget's often Victorian language, deleting some of the fustier phrases, adding or redefining 20,000 others, including, for example, Watergate, streaking, hype and quadraphonic sound. "A modern man or woman," she says, "may work as an ombudsman, a psephologist, a spokesperson, a gogo dancer or a deejay." But the disturbed newspaper reaction came from the fact that Lloyd's updating featured an assault on sexism. Indeed, the word sexist has been added to the new edition of the thesaurus, right after "biased, twisted, jaundiced." Women are no longer listed as a sub-category of mankind but of humankind. And among the exemplars of "excellence," "superman" has been joined by "wonderwoman."

Sexism in language has been angrily debated for at least a decade. Not only are school textbooks being purged, but scholarly committees are re-examining even the Bible to determine whether the Son of Man, for example, should be renamed the Child of God. This may sound like faddism, but reformers insist that the wide spread use of terms like policeman and chairman helps decide who gets the jobs (and the power), that what people call things sometimes governs what they think about them. Traditionalists retort that language cannot and should not be subjected to such moral judgments.

Peter Roget was sympathetic to both philosophical approaches. An English physician of Swiss ancestry, he invented a slide rule, did basic optical research on what was to become movie film, and spent half a century intermittently listing words according to six quasi-scientific categories of meaning: abstract relations, volition, affections, and so on. But when he first published his thesaurus in 1852, his goal was partly the Utopian search for a universal language. Editor Lloyd, who once taught English in Uganda, faintly echoes that tone. "The new edition exhibits my interests," she says. "It was bound to." One result of this approach is a large supply of environmental words (recycling, renewable energy sources, greenhouse effect); another is a special sensitivity toward racial terms. "Some epithets I left out because inclusion gives them an aura of respectability," she says.

About 20 million copies of Roget's Thesaurus have been sold. Half a dozen American publishers put out their own versions, and most of them sniff at the idea of any major updating or expurgating. St. Martin's, the New York publisher that has issued the most recent authorized Longman edition, will decide this summer whether to take on the revised version. "There has been a marked change in the way people look at thesauruses," says St. Martin's President Tom McCormack. "Originally they were illustrative; they just listed synonyms. Now they are normative, because people use the thesaurus to find the words they ought to be using." When asked which words he might suppress, McCormack looked up "woman" in his desktop U.S. edition. "Ah hah," he said, "here's 'broad.' I'd want to get that out. And 'wench.' And here's one that's out of the question -- 'bit of fluff.' " But what does Lloyd's new British edition actually include as synonyms for woman? "Career woman," for one. And "Ms." And "women's libber." But also "broad, wench, moll, crumpet, nymph, damsel, dowager, lass, petticoat" and -- heavens to Betsy! -- "bit of fluff." qed

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