Aha, you appear to have stumbled on one of *my* favorite nitpicks! :) To wit, the OED is a descriptive dictionary, not a prescriptive one. They don't attempt to define the English language or codify "correct" usage, merely to record the English language as it's used in day-to-day life. If "cisgender" isn't already in the OED (and I'd be surprised if it weren't), it shouldn't take much more than a letter with a few citations to put it in. But my point is, using the OED to argue that a word "should" or "shouldn't" mean something is hideous misuse of one of the greatest linguistic endeavors of all time. Not that I *really* care that much, and I don't mean to pile on you, but it does feel nice to let my inner pedant out once in a while. :)
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Personally, as a sometime linguist, my attitude toward language is that it's fine for it to produce Lovecraftian horrors, growing "free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom." Or, uh, something slightly less apocalyptic.
All that said, now you've put a possible alternative meaning for "transgender" in my head, roughly along the lines of "has transcended earthly gender categories", which amuses me greatly. :)
I'm fully aware of the OED's descriptivist leanings, as much as I'm not a fan of them. That doesn't change the thrust of my argument, to wit, all extant uses of the 'cis' prefix are totally at odds with what people want to use it to mean in 'cisgender' (which is, of course, not in the OED, although I have no doubt that it someday will be, despite my hopes to the contrary).
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Your attitude towards linguistics is certainly the prevailing one, it's simply not mine.
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That is, indeed, precisely what I would like the term to mean, and a state I sincerely wish more people would attain.
For what it's worth, I became a lot happier with this viewpoint when I realized that language is inherently a crude and sloppy way to communicate, and can never be anything more, since it relies on mental categories, which are never precisely the same in any two people, and are simply abstractions anyway, and thus inherently faulty.
So yeah, it's broken, fixing it is impossible, stopping it is impossible, and slowing it down is a waste of time when TV is doing our work for us.
But we all get to pick our own battles, of course. :)
I still don't understand your position here (AFAICT this whole thread sprung from one in a flocked post elsewhere?), and I would like to.
Is your argument fundamentally political (i.e., that the metaphor people are relying on in order to draw an analogy to other uses of the cis- prefix is incorrect/counterrevolutionary)? Or fundamentally linguistic/literalist, i.e., that it is illegitimate to extend the use of cis- by analogy for things that don't have literal sides?
Actually, for the record, this all started in reference some entirely different posts. I hadn't read the thread neuro42 was involved in until I saw it referenced here.
That's not correct. Even if you posit a 'gender binary', you cannot be on the same or opposite side *of the concept of gender itself*, and that's the only sensible thing cis- can mean.
No! No matter what model you think of gender using, there's none in which it makes sense to be on this side of it or the opposite side of it! I don't understand why you don't see this.
It totally makes sense to be on the opposite side of the gender binary from the side you were assigned at birth! And that concept elides precisely as much cultural context as the idea that "cisalpine" refers to the southern side of the Alps, which it does. I don't understand why you don't see this.
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Down with L'Académie Française!
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Personally, as a sometime linguist, my attitude toward language is that it's fine for it to produce Lovecraftian horrors, growing "free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom." Or, uh, something slightly less apocalyptic.
All that said, now you've put a possible alternative meaning for "transgender" in my head, roughly along the lines of "has transcended earthly gender categories", which amuses me greatly. :)
Re: Down with L'Académie Française!
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Your attitude towards linguistics is certainly the prevailing one, it's simply not mine.
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That is, indeed, precisely what I would like the term to mean, and a state I sincerely wish more people would attain.
Re: Down with L'Académie Française!
So yeah, it's broken, fixing it is impossible, stopping it is impossible, and slowing it down is a waste of time when TV is doing our work for us.
But we all get to pick our own battles, of course. :)
Re: Down with L'Académie Française!
Is your argument fundamentally political (i.e., that the metaphor people are relying on in order to draw an analogy to other uses of the cis- prefix is incorrect/counterrevolutionary)? Or fundamentally linguistic/literalist, i.e., that it is illegitimate to extend the use of cis- by analogy for things that don't have literal sides?
Re: Down with L'Académie Française!
Re: Down with L'Académie Française!
Re: Down with L'Académie Française!
Re: Down with L'Académie Française!
Re: Down with L'Académie Française!
Re: Down with L'Académie Française!
Re: Down with L'Académie Française!
Re: Down with L'Académie Française!