Daily Broadside | Dictionaries Are Like Canaries in the Coal Mine

Daily Verse | Hebrews 4:13
Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight.

Thursday’s Reading: Hebrews 5-7

Thursday and we’re quickly losing time to get the Christmas shopping done. If you want to officially track Santa this year, NORAD can help.

You may remember earlier this year that I bought an old copy of Webster’s Secondary School Dictionary and posted pictures of the definitions of what a woman and a female were in 1913. I then compared those to the online Merriam-Webster’s dictionary definitions, where we learned that Webster’s had caved and expanded their definition of “female” to include “… a gender identity that is the opposite of male …”

Apparently not wanting to be left out of the virtue-signaling taking the world by storm, the online Cambridge Dictionary has gone a step further and has added inclusive definitions of a man and a woman.

The Cambridge Dictionary recently updated its definitions of “man” and “woman” to include people whose gender identity doesn’t correspond with their biological sex.

The definition of “man” in the online version includes a second meaning: “an adult who lives and identifies as male though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth.”

It didn’t occur to me at the time of my previous post to check on the word “man” and “male,” so I’ve just taken a look at Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary to compare it to Cambridge’s. The first two are Cambridge’s, the next two are Merriam-Webster’s.

Merriam-Webster gets credit for keeping the definition of “man” rational.

The Cambridge Dictionary also updated their definition of “woman” which Christopher Rufo called attention to.

Note, too, that the definition includes a plural pronoun (they) as opposed to “she.” As Rufo says, “Notice that the dictionary writers say ‘*they* may have been.’ They couldn’t bring themselves to write ‘she may have been,’ because they know they’re lying. That’s the tell,” he tweeted.”

This is how a society is overthrown. Not all at once but little by little, changes persisting like waves against the shoreline until the erosion undermines your house and it collapses around you.