If someone told you there was a sustained conspiracy to suppress lesbian history, would you believe it? Or would you consider the idea a bit paranoid? When you look at the history of how words for f/f sexuality were handled across the long history of dictionaries of the English language, it's hard to find a more accurate word than "conspiracy" to describe the systematic obscuring, suppression, and censorship involved.
Having read a lot of primary sources, I always found claims about the supposed recency of vocabulary for lesbianism to be dubious, but the first acknowledgement I found that the OED--supposedly the official record of usage and history--could not be relied on for this topic was in an online article that I blogged as LHMP #245. So when I saw announcement of Turton's book, I got very excited to see a longer exploration of this topic. And as a bonus, the book includes an extensive appendix of all the dictionary entries that do exist. (Which I will file away for future reference for my own chronology of terminology.) It took a while to get around to blogging this book, despite my intense interest, because other publications were prioritized to support podcast topics. But here we are at last.
Comments