THE DICTIONARY OF BIAS-FREE USAGE: A Guide...

THE DICTIONARY OF BIAS-FREE USAGE: A Guide to Nondiscriminatory Language by Rosalie Maggio (Oryx: $25.00). Maggio’s attempt to reduce English to an ideologically pure Newspeak by eliminating every expression she deems tainted by prejudice (including “weightism,” “handicappism” and “adultism”) would be frightening if it weren’t so unintentionally funny. She decries Achilles’ heel, Mickey Finn, Uncle Sam and Scrooge as “male-based,” but offers no objection to Niobe’s Tears, Columbia, curie or Lady Amherst pheasants. Taken to its illogical conclusion, this philosophy would require renaming the Straits of Magellan, most of the planets and the elements Einsteinium and Mendelevium. Unlike the compilers of most dictionaries, Maggio does not seem overly concerned with accuracy. She describes Dutch courage as “ethnocentric” when it’s in fact mildly pejorative, and lists mad as a hatter as a synonym for mad as a wet hen, when the former connotes insanity and the latter anger. In one hilarious grammatical lapse, she proclaims “death is both sexist and racist today: men of all ages die at greater rates than women.” If that were true, individual men might die two or three times. This wooly-minded effort at redressing real and perceived social, cultural and--the reader suspects--personal wrongs by mutilating the English language recalls the moral of Thurber’s “The Bear Who Let It Alone”: “You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.”