Aug 27, 2004  |  By: ADRIAN BRUNE  | COMMENTS     

It comprises 1,888 pages, and defines more than 2,200 distinctly Canadian nouns, adjectives and verbs in addition to the 145,000 words in the English language.

It provides journalists, students and the common Canadian with the correct terminology when they are hungry for a “bismark” (a donut) or need to “book off” (slack off) work for a vacation from the “cube farm” (an array of office cubicles).

And now the second edition of the “Canadian Oxford Dictionary” — the country’s bestselling lexicon — includes definitions for the vernacular used by gays for years, from “gaydar” to “lipstick lesbian,” “cruisy” to “civil union.”

It also delineates the word “marriage” in much broader terms as “the legal or religious union of two people” without mentioning “a man and a woman.”

The release of the official Canadian dictionary this fall marks the first attempt to formally sanction gay-specific language and widely introduce it to the mainstream. While publishers of United States dictionaries, such as Miriam-Webster, say they will not likely follow suit for quite some time, Oxford University Press, the house behind several country-specific dictionaries, plans on keeping up-to-date with gay lingo as it progresses.

“Dictionaries just reflect what the actual reality is,” said lexicographer Tom Howell, a lexicographer with Oxford University Press Canadian Oxford.

“If a dictionary says a marriage is the union of a man and a woman, that’s just describing the fact that has been the case for hundreds of years. But if the law changes or society changes or something happens where the word ‘marriage’ comes to apply to same-sex unions, we just change the definition.”

Etymology of ‘marriage’
Katherine Barber, the top editor of the “Canadian Oxford Dictionary,” green-lighted the new definition for marriage after a ruling by the Ontario Court of Appeals on June 10, in which a judge decided that restricting matrimony to “one man and one woman” violated the dignity of gay couples.

The court redefined marriage as “the voluntary union for life of two persons to the exclusion of all others,” and Barber decided that Oxford should, too, ditching its previous designation based on an 1866 English ruling.

Many Canadians have criticized Barber for the definition change, writing letters to local newspapers, which have designated the dictionary as its official word source. Barber says the reason some people object to a new definition boils down to homophobia.

She pointed out that the word “marriage,” when traced back to its Latin origins, does not actually specify a man and a woman. In fact, the word, “marry,” properly means, “to provide with a husband” and derives from the Latin mari, meaning “male.”

“They don’t want to admit that gay people can have relationships that are just like their ideal heterosexual relationship,” said Barber, who said she read Fowler’s “Modern English Usage” in bed as a child.

For the other gay terms — as well as the other 5,000 new words added this year — five professionally trained lexicographers spent five years examining databases containing more than 20 million words of Canadian text from more than 8,000 Canadian sources of an astonishing diversity: Inuit magazines, the work of prominent Canadian writers, daily and weekly newspapers from all of the country’s regions and, of course, the Canadian Tire catalogue.

“To us, of course, the gay media is also totally legitimate media, and we definitely consider its language,” Howell said. “It is a matter of lexicographical principle.”

Many of the new words reflect changes in Canadian attitudes and social mores.

“In addition to our revised definition of marriage, there is a particularly Canadian aspect to our coverage of gay and lesbian vocabulary in that we include the term ‘two-spirited,’ used to mean gay or lesbian in the Canadian Aboriginal community,” Barber said.

She first noticed this word on a City of Toronto bus shelter advertisement promoting tolerance. Though being a Canadian dictionary, it still features a lot of hockey words, curling terms and euphemisms for beer.

But linguists and anthropologists say that the decision of the lexicographers at Oxford to include gay vocabulary among those new words amounts to more than just “lexicographical principle.” It lends a widespread, social affirmation of a minority group’s identity.

Etymology of ‘marriage’
For more than 150 years, language experts have regarded the dictionary department of Oxford University Press, with its dozens of regional dictionary editions, as one of the most trusted language references in the world.

When the first edition of the “Canadian Oxford Dictionary” arrived in bookstores in 1999, it sold more than 190,000 copies ...