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3 - Silencing Sex

Social Propriety and Lexical Censorship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2024

Stephen Turton
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

This chapter examines how lexicographers symbolically policed the borders of English not only by distancing same-sex practices from English society but by disbarring words for those practices from the English language. Though terms for women who had sex with women existed in other Early Modern English text types (and in the bilingual dictionaries that influenced early monolingual lexicographers), they were barely acknowledged in hard-word and general dictionaries. Sexuality between men, though initially well-represented, was also excised by many general lexicographers in the wake of Samuel Johnson, reflecting a growing concern that dictionaries should record only ‘proper’ English. Acts that were inadmissible in polite lexicography would partially re-emerge in dictionaries of criminal cant, which encoded an earthy alternative vocabulary for the men associated with London’s molly houses during the eighteenth century. However, even cant dictionaries would edge carefully around the existence of intimacy between women. And as dictionaries of the underworld gave way to those of fashionable slang in the nineteenth century, unnatural sex of any sort was once again thrust beyond the pale.

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Chapter
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Before the Word Was Queer
Sexuality and the English Dictionary, 1600–1930
, pp. 84 - 116
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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  • Silencing Sex
  • Stephen Turton, University of Oxford
  • Book: Before the Word Was Queer
  • Online publication: 14 March 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009006804.004
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  • Silencing Sex
  • Stephen Turton, University of Oxford
  • Book: Before the Word Was Queer
  • Online publication: 14 March 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009006804.004
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Silencing Sex
  • Stephen Turton, University of Oxford
  • Book: Before the Word Was Queer
  • Online publication: 14 March 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009006804.004
Available formats
×