Mansplain is Australian word of the year
|
Version 0 of 1. “Mansplaining” has topped a list of new entries to the Macquarie Dictionary of Australian English in 2014. The portmanteau word, which describes the act of a man explaining to a woman something she probably already knows, topped a shortlist of neologisms that included binge watching, bamboo ceiling, lifehacking and selfie stick. The dictionary’s editorial committee said mansplain was “a clever coinage which captured neatly the concept of the patronising explanation offered only too frequently by some men”. Verb (t) Colloquial (humorous) (of a man) to explain (something) to a woman, in a way that is patronising because it assumes that a woman will be ignorant of the subject matter. [MAN + (EX)PLAIN with s inserted to create a pronunciation link with explain] Each year, the Macquarie Dictionary includes up to 1,000 updates, two-thirds of which are new words and a third new definitions for existing ones. The dictionary’s editor, Susan Butler, said that currency, not topicality, was the key. “These are not just words that have made the media for some reason. They are not words people look up all the time in the dictionary like ‘committee’ and ‘accommodation’. These are words that have risen to the surface of society in the past year.” Related: Shh, let me mansplain Macquarie Dictionary's word of the year to you | Amy Gray The word mansplain originated in the US among feminist commentators such as Rebecca Solnit in her article Men Still Explain Things to Me, although it remains unclear who first coined the term. In 2010, it featured in the New York Times words of the year list. Butler said that time-lags between American and Australian usage of words were still common. “There used to be a 10- to 15-year lag. And then we got to the late 90s when words like couch potato appeared in the New Yorker and six months later appeared in an Australian newspaper. These days it can be instant, but mansplain took a little longer.” The word has spawned several spin-offs including techsplain and whitesplain (the act of a white person talking down to a person of a different race). “It started out as a humorous coinage but I think it may have gained a bit of bite as it went along,” Butler said. Butler, who also wrote The Aitch Factor: Adventures in Australian English, said that different threads were visible through the dictionary’s history. “In the 80s, it was all about PCs and computers. Somewhere in the late 1990s, it became all about the environment, carbon and all the jargon we developed to talk about those issues. This year, we see a continuation of our attempt to describe life on the internet.” Related: All About Women: a festival to push feminist debate into the mainstream The Macquarie Dictionary’s people’s choice word of the year was “share plate”, defined as “a serving in a restaurant designed as multiple small portions so that several diners can share the same dish”. New words could come from many sources, said Butler. “Everyone who works on the dictionary knows they have to have a piece of paper to hand to jot down a word as soon as they hear one they don’t know. We read the media, we listen to the news, we watch television, we look at the internet, we notice things.” The one source that provided noticeably fewer new words, said Butler, was books. |