Wimmin, Wimps & Wallflowers: an Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Gender and Sexual Orientation Bias in the United States. - book review

Journal of Sex Research, Nov, 2001 by Martha Cornog

Edited by Philip H. Herbst. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press, 2001, 322 pages. Cloth, $39.95.

   The Real Dictionary will give all words that exist in use, the bad words as
   well as any.... These words ought to be collected--the bad words as well as
   the good.--Many of these bad words are fine. -- Walt Whitman (1904, pp.
   6-7)

   The ever-present fascination with slang ... continues to spawn so-called
   slang dictionaries, mostly idiosyncratically selected helter-skelter
   glossaries decidedly NOT based ... on time-honored principles of
   lexicography.--Thomas Nunnally (2001, p. 168)

There are at least six types--or domains--of sexual language: medico-scientific, standard, slang, euphemistic, intimate, erotic, and insulting (Cornog, 1994; Perper, 1995). In medico-scientific terms, "Tom Smith has an erectile dysfunction," while in standard speech, he "has trouble getting an erection." In slang, he "can't get it up" or "is stuck in neutral." Euphemistically, he "can't do his husbandly (or marital) duty." More intimately to his wife, Tom might grumble, humorously, that "Junior is taking a nap." In the cliches of erotic fiction, "Tom's manhood shied away from Cynthia's pleading eagerness."

Insultingly, Tom Smith is simply a limp-dick, one of the 1,100 words and expressions described in Wimmin, Wimps & Wallflowers. Herbst's first book, The Color of Words (1997), described labels for racial and ethnic groups, and now he has taken on gender and sexual orientation: "These terms and expressions shed light on how our lives are shaped by learned ideas of gender and sexual orientation; in particular, how words are used to put some groups down and privilege others" (p. xiii).

Several kinds of words predominate: slurs and insults like limp-dick, faggot, and slut; more neutral words like girl and honey that in certain contexts can be condescending or disparaging; terms like transgender and she-male that are hotly debated or used in different ways by different groups; and words like herstory, homophobia, sex object, and looksism, meant to throw light on how gender and sexual orientation have been disparaged. The entries include a definition/commentary (often lengthy--faggot and girl run to over a page each), sometimes examples of usage from literature and the media, sometimes etymology, and cross-references to related words.

Many entries refer to stigmatized groups like women and gender nonconformists. However, quite a number refer to men in general and to heterosexuals, for example: hunk, schmuck, caveman, geezer, old goat, bugfucker, jack-off, breeder--and toyboy. Other words represent "in-group" disparagements of other members of the same group, like crunchie and lipstick for types of lesbians.

Herbst points out how some of the insulting words have been reclaimed within a target group, such as queer, butch, dyke, and girl (especially in girl-power and as grrlz and similar spellings). Faggot too has been reclaimed as the title of a well-known gay novel by Larry Kramer (1989). However, such words can be "reclaimed" only by speakers within the stigmatized group. On the lips of a heterosexual, words like faggot and queer win no friends!

Herbst has clearly put a great deal of work and heart into his book. However, it is not truly a dictionary. Indeed, it is more a work of hopeful multicultural idealism than a dictionary in the lexicographer's sense. Etymologies, all the various meanings of each entry, and examples with citations are not always present and may not be consistent with other scholarship. For example, he argues that the word cunt is etymologically (and flatteringly) related to the word cunning (p. 63), but the Oxford English Dictionary (Compact OED, 1989) derives cunning from Middle English cunnen, meaning "knowledge," and by contrast derives cunt from Middle English cunte, cognate with similar Germanic and Scandinavian forms. Francoeur, Cornog, Perper, and Scherzer (1995, pp. 721-722) conjecture that cunt is historically linked to Gothic qens/qenth, and perhaps to a Proto-Indo-European root *gwen-, meaning "female human being." (The asterisk indicates a hypothetical form.) Other possibilities are cuneus, meaning wedge in Latin (Lowry, 1976) and the Arabic khunt, meaning "femininity" but also the name of a beautiful woman in a poem by Harun Ar-Rachid from the 8th century (Mernissi, 2001, p. 136). However, Herbst cites neither the OED entry for cunt nor the Francoeur et al. dictionary.

Herbst also does not explain the principles whereby he includes or excludes meanings. Meanings that do not fit specifically into gender or sexual orientation areas are usually omitted. For example, horse is missing its meaning of "heroin"; half-and-half is not glossed as also referring to a favorite sex act among clients of prostitutes. However, head, glossed first as sometimes referring to sexually available women, is also glossed in passing--and misleadingly--as simply "sexual gratification" with no mention of its usual referent, oral sex. In short, "time-honored principles of lexicography" are not followed. Instead, Wimmin, Wimps & Wallflowers appears to be a sort of lexicon-via-essay of Herbst's personal--and perhaps helter-skelter--pick among terms that he believes either derogate or point to reformed attitudes relating to women, men, and sexual minorities. Herbst's heart may be in the right place about words that hurt people, but a scholar of sexual language he is not.