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David-Antoine Williams, Stephen Turton. Before the Word Was Queer: Sexuality and the English Dictionary, 1600–1930, The Review of English Studies, Volume 76, Issue 323, February 2025, Pages 103–105, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgae075
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Extract
This book, which is mainly about dictionaries of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, opens with a contemporary vignette. In 2013, after passage of a new law in England and Wales permitting marriage between couples of the same sex, a small media controversy arose over, of all things, the plans and intentions of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Headlines announced that the ‘Oxford Dictionary’ would ‘change the definition of “marriage”’ or ‘“redefine” marriage’. Lexicographers aren’t legislators. Amending a dictionary’s definition of marriage is an act, but not an Act, and not similar in cause or effect to changing the legal definition of marriage. Two (or more) definitions of definition are at play in this category confusion, which exemplifies an ancient and persistent difficulty of the human mind in distinguishing between things and words for things, especially when a single word may mean different things in different contexts.
Dictionaries are a helpmeet in differentiating such meanings and contexts, which may explain in part why they are so susceptible to extra-lexicographical controversies. Authority in lexical matters spills over—or is perceived to. But dictionary definitions, being a form of limitation, have their own limitations. Did homosexuality exist before homosexuality was invented (first in German, to be introduced into English in 1892, according to the OED, which first documented the word in 1933)? Did homosexuals? In the most common manner of speaking, the answer to both questions may be clearly ‘yes’, but the prevailing conceptualizations of homosexuality today bear little in common with the one elaborated in Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), let alone those that predominated in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. The OED may give evidence of conceptual and connotative drift in its illustrative quotations and may highlight these in its definitions or usage notes, but understanding the continuities and discontinuities between concepts and their predecessors is the careful tendentious work of intellectual history, not lexicography. Michel Foucault’s Histoire de la sexualité (four volumes, 1976–2018), for example, showed, among other things, how conceptualizations of sexual attraction and behaviour (and what are behaviour and attraction?) shifted over centuries from being primarily juridical concepts to primarily medical and then psychological ones, whence contemporary identitarian ideas have evolved.
