blogging is powerful…and so are google alerts

April 17th, 2008

Okay. So this is either a HUGE coincidence or good things happen to those that blog in the name of writing and word justice.

On April 15th, I wrote a blog post about thesaurus.com listing ‘weak’, among other degrading words, as a synonym for ‘female’.

Then, during my web marketing workshop on the 16th, I took my class to see the offensive entry…and it was gone (cue music). They also changed the ‘male’ entry. The ‘female’ replacement is:

Main Entry:	feminine
Part of Speech:	adjective
Definition:	Of, relating to, or characteristic of women.
Synonyms:	distaff, womanish, womanly, female
Source:	Roget’s II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary. Copyright © 2003, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Fascinating. No comments were left on my blog, by the way. My detective skills think this happened: thesaurus.com got a Google Alert about themselves, read my post, changed their entry. As I said, it could be some crazy coincidence…but I don’t know. My other guess is that some irate woman that works at thesaurus.com happened upon the ‘female’ entry on their site and demanded it be changed…still the timing is mind-boggling.

Thesaurus.com – thank you for doing the right thing. No matter why the ‘female’ entry has been changed, the bottom line is that it has been changed – thank goddess.