merriam rulester

Putting words you don't know the meaning of in the dictionary accompanied by an explanation of what those words mean? Woke nonsense, obviously.

To be fair: their definition lacks a definition of what is male or female.

I agree about the bees. Yes there is far more variation in other organisms than Humans. In biology homosexuality exists, but it means reproduction by same sex individuals. Not what Humans do when they are homosexual, that is rather social interaction from a biological Point of view.
- No? Animals frequently have homosexual non-reproductive case. This is the case in numerous species
  Also, reproduction via sex where only one sex is involved is not called homosexuality.

Sex in biology has a clear aim: genetic recombination. Everything in function of the recombination of 2 gametes can be considered sex in Biology.
(I think that only plasmid exchange is non sexual exchange of genetic information but eukaryotes don't do that) A lof of social interactions in zoology however, we consider as sex or gender interactions in culture.
the messiness of sex, of others, other organisms, is just a perspective.

Dictionaries are - by definition - descriptive. It is not their duty to judge what goes into them. They merely collected terms used by people and explain what they mean.
Demanding to remove information from a dictionary, because you do not like what it expresses or the people who use those terms, is the very definition of censorship.
- Also a very ham handed attempt to manipulate culture.
  Or perhaps people who have had their culture manipulated running face first in to something outside their sphere and getting angry that it doesn’t comport with their manipulated understanding.
- Dictionaries are - by definition - descriptive. It is not their duty to judge what goes into them. They merely collected terms used by people and explain what they mean.
  Demanding to remove information from a dictionary, because you do not like what it expresses or the people who use those terms, is the very definition of censorship.
  Aha! Who defined that? Big Dictionary, that's who.
  
  down with big dic!
  
  Me? I am impartial, I am certainly not being paid by Big Dictionary!
  *attempts to hide the old, dusty Oxford English Dictionary on the bookshelf
  
  If Big Dictionary wasnt evil, Why would they call a dictionary "DOOM"
- Dictionaries are - by definition - descriptive. It is not their duty to judge what goes into them. They merely collected terms used by people and explain what they mean.
  You would get banned off a conservative subreddit for saying this.
  
  Censorship isn't when we get rid of woke books like the dictionary dummy, censorship is when I don't get to say a slur without anyone getting mad at me.

These people really don't have two braincells to rub together, do they?
- A brain... what? Is that another gender you just made up!? 😠
  
  Incel?
- Brains are too woke
  
  Get you a sleepy brain
- Most of the time they're just lying about things like this.
- Only one lonely braincel

Merriam dgaf. Their job is to figure out what words people are using, and document them. People could invent the word "bumblesausagecock" and if it caught on, they would add it.
- https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cromulent
- That would be such a bumblesausagecock thing to do
  
  They definitely get bumblesausagecocked for doing that.
  
  If I were to invent a meaning for this, it would be a well-endowed man who is a drop-kick in most other respects
- Exactly. Dictionaries are descriptive tools, not prescriptive.
  
  I generally agree, though there's cases where you want to be selective with what you're describing. This Low Saxon dictionary, for example, has a policy of not listing loans and calques from Dutch, German, or English unless they've been well-established, doubly so if there's an already existing Low Saxon word which fits the bill.
  The justification is that the language is in a vulnerable state with native proficiency having jumped at least a full generation so many speakers' vocabulary is lacking. E.g. my repertoire of words for plants and animals in Low Saxon is negligible, so in speech I have to improvise i.e. use a loan. I occasionally look stuff up and I don't want to find the loan I just used listed, giving it dictionary blessing would amount to aiding and abetting the decline of the language. Why the hell would anyone want to aid and abet the sidelining of wonderful words like Huulbessen, "howl broom".
  
  Tell that to the French
  
  I'd argue that dictionaries should be prescriptive, with systems in place for modification as language changes and semantics shift.
  Case in point: the word "literally" now being its own antonym.

"Hope you're ready to define words, dictionary" that's their whole thing dude.
Also I would highly recommend anyone into anime to check out Fune wo Amu/The Great Passage. It's an anime about the creation of a dictionary. It's a pretty compelling love letter to the idea of language in general. I think I started watching it when it was airing thinking 'this sounds boring as hell, they've gotta be cooking something if this got funded' and they were.
- Seconded on Fune Wo Amu.
  If you are sick and tired of every single anime having the same Generic High School Protagonist, and not a single character over the age of 30, then Fune Wo Amu is a breath of fresh air as a show for adults that isn't afraid to deviate from the usual formula, and tell a different kind of story.
  https://myanimelist.net/anime/32948/Fune_wo_Amu/

This is why the idea of gender needs to disappear eventually. If we have it, we then need to label every single permutation of every expression. Maybe that's fun for some people, but it's definitely not fun for me.
To be clear I'm not saying you can't be a woman or a man or whatever. I understand I have to pay that tax. But in 200 years maybe it won't matter anymore because we'll all just be people. And that seems nice to me.
- Not really. Like with music, some labels are broader than others. “Oh you like rock? Rock & Roll, Glam Rock, Hard Rock, Metal?” “Oh what kind of Metal, Trash, Death, Symphonic.”
  The broader terms existing does not negate the more precise terms and visa versa.
  
  I think the broader argument tends to boil down to the fact that unlike music, which people can simply not engage in describing on a regular basis, gender expression is something that requires much more active participation by all members of a society, and that gender is not inherently separate from the rest of the human experience.
  It's already hard enough for some people to remember names, now imagine having to remember which of any number of thousands of neopronouns each individual person you know uses, for example.
  Contrast that with their "we'll all just be people" stance, which seems to just be a different wording of gender abolition, and you have a world where people simply express themselves as they are without having to increasingly sublabel.
  It's like how while people can have long hair and short hair, wear dark clothes and light clothes, have blue/brown/green/gray/etc eyes, be introverted or extroverted, have a large or small social battery, or experience and display any number of different characteristics, while not having to actually label those characteristics in general conversation or identification.
  They're simply traits within the human experience, but not traits that we have to outwardly label and display on a very frequent basis, unlike the way we usually talk about gender. This is especially important considering how every single human being experiences things even a little differently from one another, thus meaning that the number of sublabels is theoretically as large, if not larger than the current population of the earth.
  I don't deny that the labels can still exist, and be useful to people, but I think gender is often treated as if it has to be some sort of mythical separate part of the brain, independent from all the other variations in human experience, and thus it must have a separate label at all times, even while we don't particularly care to label and identify with other characteristics that are also within the human experience, some of which have historically flowed between being considered very gendered or less/not gendered, such as assorted personality traits, length of hair, preferred social activities and groups, certain clothing, etc.
- That's like saying we need to get rid of all color names since there are so many hues and shades. What are chartreuse and fuchsia? Better just get rid of green and purple since there are so many colors.
  
  All we need are hex codes and rgb!
  
  Actually no, that's not what they said. They said sure you can have green, but not everything has to be green, blue, or red.
  Also, purple is a lie.
  
  The difference is you don't need to identify someone's color or commit a social faux pas. Keep your color names, I just don't want to have to figure out if you are green or lime green and address you as such.
- we’ll all just be people.
  Very optimistic of you. Oh well, I guess we need this kind of positive messaging in 2025.
- I think it's awfully optimistic of you to think 200 years would be enough to erase gender bias even if most of society went into it with good intentions. Categorizing is too deep an instinct. It's easier for most people to add categories to the 2 most of us were taught as infants than to erase the concept entirely.
  I suppose you could use they/them for everyone, to acknowledge the othergender aspects of them that may not be apparent or recognized by anyone including themselves.
  But you'd piss a lot of people off.
  Then again, that might be a good thing.
  
  My hope is that most of the pissed off people would be dead due to natural causes.
- Personally, i wouldn't be too pleased to take a bird home and find out she has a penis twice the size of mine.
  Jokes aside, with no offence intended, how can I as a person attracted to breasts and vaginas, know what i'm getting into when I'm talking to someone. I don't want to lead someone on but at the same time i don't want to be led on.
  or am i confusing sex and gender again? I'm honestly trying but i'm by no means fluent on the topic.
  
  I'm so glad you said breasts!! Come with me on an exploratory walk:
  Let's say you fall for a woman. You're getting intimate and she stops you to tell you something serious. See, she hasn't been honest about her body with you. She hasn't dated in awhile and didn't know when the right time was to tell you, but she wants you so much that it can't be avoided now.
  She had her breasts removed for an unspecified medical reason. You thought she had a great rack, but those were prosthetics. Despite her biological circumstances he happens to identify with having breasts and prosthetics make her feel confident and normal.
  Has there been deception? Have you been led on? I don't think so, I think this was this just part of learning whether you're compatible with someone. Only you know whether the absence of breasts is a deal breaker for you, and you get to decide freely in that moment.
  Does that help?
  
  I think if you're interested in dating or sex, and you have preferences that are deal breakers. Ask for what they're equipped with.
  Similar to how if you're planning on dating someone today and if have sex is important to you. You communicate that. And ask them if they are asexual.
  It's perfectly okay to have deal-breaking preferences for these things.
  Good question.
  
  Sex: not binary, a lot more confusing the more scientific you make it. Can absolutely be changed. It's coming up on being an outdated term pretty quickly, if not irrelevant already. Probably the least understood term by 99.999999% of people.
  Gender: binary exists, a lot of people exist outside of it, too. Also dynamic and fluid. It's the role you play, socially. A lot of people think it should be eliminated. I'm personally on the fence on that. (Bonus: gender expression: is not the same as gender. Gender is who one is, gender expression is how one does it.)
  SexUALITY: may be what you're confused on. Is defined by the term sex, but generally refers to the sex of you and the sex of who you're into. Which, if you go by what "sex" means, gets confusing really fast.
  So stop worrying about labels, go with the flow, and since life is too short as it is, stop letting society tell you things that you like are acceptable, and if you find it pretty and it feels good and you aren't hurting anybody AND there's consent of all parties involved, GO FOR IT.
  I think I'm forgetting stuff here, but the gist is to stop being afraid and stop judging and hating. Accept your ignorance, accept humility, and stop being afraid of learning. Nobody's coming to get you besides the fascists and maybe the tankies.
  Ok my morning dump is over gotta wipe have a nice day.
  
  Sex is defined by genetics
  Gender is defined by you
  
  Sex is what's in your pants, gender is how you look.
- This just reminds me of the shitpost of humans/aliens.
  It was a "fancy" bathroom sign for men and women.

12000? It's over 20000! https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/why-this-fungus-has-over-20-000-sexes
Sex is not the same in biology/science as it is in culture.
Sex in culture may be a choice, in biology it is a given. Sometimes a bad interpretation of facts.
- Tfw a fungus has 20,000 times more sex than me
- Sexuality as in who or what you are sexually attracted to, not sex in what kind of anatomy you have.
- Sex is not the same in biology/science as it is in culture.
  What do you mean? Why not?
  Sex in culture may be a choice, in biology it is a given. Sometimes a bad interpretation of facts.
  Are you talking about the act of sex? Bees can be considered to have 2 sexes but 3 genders, female bees are either a queen or a worker. Male bees are called drones. The female worker bees do not have sex.
  If you mean genetic sex being a given, I'd bring up oxylotyls or the sex changes in frogs.
  Sex is not a given in biology, it's very messy and complicated, maybe even more so than in human culture.

I really don't understand why anyone would get mad over any word being added to the dictionary unless the definition is obviously biased. I remember giggling at the profanity and racial slurs in the dictionary when I was a kid and nobody was upset about that as far as I know.
- We have to understand that to the conservative mind, the very notion of "bias" doesn't make sense because it implies a relative difference between perspectives.
  I say this also about the idea of conservative "punching down" in that to them, the concept is nonsense. They do not live in the same world we do. To them there is only "punching." If there's a threat, "punch" at it. They don't recognize or understand the idea of class or privilege, there is only "how I feel at this moment." And as depressing as it is to understand, it's literally the only thing they can grasp. Linear thinking.
  We have a whole giant chunk of the population who have never been taught how to use language to reshape perspectives in their head, and as such, live in a linear world where there is only a "now" feeling and the means in which that feeling must be attacked or defended.
  This is why it's utterly bonkers people keep trying to argue with them from a place of consistency, going "that's hypocritical!" like they even grasp it. They will say it back to you like it's just an insult, not what it represents. This is why you see them all saying the same buzzwords back at you. "You're the weird one!" "You're the nazi!" "You're the fascist!" they don't know or care what the words mean, it's punching and that's all that matters.
  I strongly feel if we, all of us who have functional frontal lobes and language centers, understood this better we would be far better at shaping the public narrative and not making it worse by arguing nonsense they don't understand.
  At least, it would have been but we let it go for too long and now they own the country and are pillaging our coffers and the next generation of kids is going to have even worse language skills and comprehension because they're going to be educated in churches and private schools that teach the importance of spirit and herbs and how the blacks started the civil war.
  
  Agreed. With the continued erosion of education, the onslaught of mis/disinformation, the hijacking of our brain chemistry, and the general constant anxiety of trying to exist under late stage capitalism, it's going to keep getting worse.
- I remember giggling at the profanity and racial slurs in the dictionary when I was a kid and nobody was upset about that as far as I know.
  Hey it is me JD Vance, I was and still am upset, kids giggling reminds me other people experience joy and love and then I start to feel like an empty monster.
  
  I hear fucking a couch is a great way to relieve stress, and feel better, you ever tried that?

I started reading this link for the lazy: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/genderqueer
And found this pretty darn good article for clueless but well-meaning people who want to learn and support their kid/grandkid/friend:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/merriam-websters-short-list-of-gender-and-identity-terms
- I thought trans classified as genderqueer, guess my genderqueer license just got revoked 😔
  
  Trans is a broad category. It does include those who are genderqueer, but also those who are not.
  Some trans people are nonbinary, seeing themselves as something other than fully male or female. The term genderqueer is probably an accurate description for them.
  Other trans people are binary, seeing themselves as fully male or female, despite the circumstances of their births. As a binary trans woman, I do not consider myself to be genderqueer, as the aspects in which I am not female are an error that I am working very hard to correct!
  
  Queer in the literal/archaic sense

I found a HuffPo article linking to the original Twitter post (link to bad place) in case anyone wanted to verify this was legit before sharing.
- You can change any x link to xcancel to be able to view the content without giving musk the traffic stats: https://xcancel.com/MerriamWebster/status/724645568014868480

Now I love you even more Merriam Webster<3

“In reply to” is breaking my brain. Has it always been phrased like that on twitter? I feel like “replying to” or ”in response to” would be clear whereas I’m only able to make sense of “in reply to” if I infer the elision of an article. That said, even “in a reply to” would make more sense when introducing a quote or excerpt from the reply.
Unless I’m just experiencing semantic satiation because I’ve been repeating it to myself in confusion.
- response and reply are synonyms in your example. does "in a response to" sound better?
  
  “In a response to” also works, but it has the same quote connotation for me that “in a reply to” has. I think “in response” feels like an established term to me that has a separate meaning from “in” + “response,” so substituting “reply” for “response” doesn’t work for me.
  Interestingly, although the Cambridge dictionary includes references to each (meaning “in reply to” is formally accepted English [funnily enough, I can understand the second usage there, for very formal written correspondence]), there’s only a full page for “in response to.”