How words get into dictionaries. Petitions, direct requests, and (not atypical from transgenders) veiled threats aren’t how it happens. The absence of the word transphobia from any dictionary is not evidence of transphobia. Nor is there such a thing as “the dictionary,” a phrase that basically gave the game away right there.

I asked the organizers if they understood, first of all, the actual process of inclusion of words in a dictionary. I also asked if they even understood that the two examples in their petition – the OED and Microsoft Word – are two largely unrelated kinds of “dictionary.” (The latter, a spellcheck dictionary, is really a lexicon and in all likelihood is algorithmically generated.) Of course I didn’t get a reply.

If you want to do this properly

Submit citations, ideally going back at least ten years, of the word in use. This is a pain in the ass to do, as I know from experience. Googling is an only-barely-viable method.

Update

(2013.07.05) After I sent her the link to this post, Claudia White wrote back and claimed indeed to know how the OED adds words to its “lexicon” and the difference between the two kinds of dictionaries. I wrote back that, if true, her task now is to submit citations. “To paraphrase RoboCop, your move, creep.”

“Long-awaited.”

(I would also accept “long-cherished” or “hoped-for.” The sentiment, though unstated, is present.)

Every year an article gets passed around about interpreters at concerts. Last year – actually, two years ago – it was the Washington Post’s, focussing on Lady Gaga. At every L. Gaga concert in the United States stand a gaggle of teenage girls, and a few special boys, watching the interpreters. This year it’s all about Holly Maniatty, who admittedly does krazy shit and gets paid peanuts for it, which is more than a crime.

Then people start asking, either innocently or disingenuously, “Deaf people go to concerts?” Yes. Even stone-deaf people (this means teens and young adults) will go, but the more hearing you have the more likely you are to go to a concert. (That’s true whether you consider yourself deaf or Deaf or whatever else.) And you go because you can: Organizers have to provide interpreters, captioning, or whatever else you need.

Those reasons you could have researched yourself. But you won’t know about this one. Deaf people go to concerts because an entire generation has grown up with captioned music videos. There are tales of one or two videos having been captioned before 1989, but that was the year captioning became the norm for major-label music videos. And that happened only because Ed Stasium, a record producer with a hard-of-hearing daughter who is surely all growed up now and could look up this post quite easily; Donna Horn, then of the Caption Center and latterly of the abomination known as CaptionMax; and I all made it happen. Ed used his label contacts and influence; Donna patiently explained how the process works to one label, producer, tape house, and broadcaster after another; and I wrote a couple of articles on the topic, chief among them an op-ed in Billboard that everyone would have seen. (I also persuaded some of the Canadian funding bodies to require captioning and sometimes to pay for it. Ask me about getting strung along endlessly by MuchMusic.)

Thousands of (usually ill-captioned) videos later, deaf kids have grown up just accepting they will have some access to music, however limited or not by their hearing impairment. So of course they’re gonna show up at concerts.

(CORRECTED) The ACT UP Alumni Reunion was last night. This is seriously the banner art they used for it:

Gran Fury would be rolling in its grave were it not for the fact that Donald Moffett et al. are all still alive. Some dumb twat banged out the RE in scrunched Arial instead of spending at most 40 bucks to retypeset the word in its original typeface, Gill Extra Condensed Bold.

Gays, who should know better, are willing to besmirch – here, to rewrite – gay history. I thought we had heteros to do that for and to us.

Also on the topic of ACT UP graphic design

• There’s an entire exhibition on.

• Avram Finkelstein disputes the accepted history of the SILENCE = DEATH logotype (not once but twice). But he didn’t answer my mail offering him all the space in the world to prove what he says. (He could still be right.) It’s undisputed, if little-known, fact.

• The other month I flipped through AIDS Demo/Graphics (sic) for the first time in 20 years. I see now I was too young the first time around to understand what a crashing theoretical bore it, and its insufferable author, are. Graphic design is resistant to theory.

Lifetime Achievement Award in
Retroactive Misapplication of Queer Theory

Just as you would do in response to someone who spontaneously clobbers you with a term like abortuary or rape culture, anybody who uses the word intersectionality and means it is somebody you cannot trust.

A worst-case scenario of retroactive misapplication of that LGBT buzzword has to be Julianne Escobedo Shepherd (no relation). She had the temerity to criticize ACT UP for having been too white. Buddy Cole would say “as if anything can be,” but what I said instead is that ACT UP saved millions of lives. All this catchphrase-wielding vizmin has managed is writing a few music reviews, which I can say from experience is easy to do badly.

I have finally located the source for the hard-to-find photograph of Jonny Ive and apparently all his designers (16 total, two female, two J) receiving a D&AD achievement award.

Alternatively: The typeface that word looks best in is Zapf International.

Not a poisoned apple.

Crashtext; Glitcher.