![]() The definition was, as I like to say, a giant onion of suck.” “The reason why I watched this video is because I was inundated with emails from angry people wanting to know why the hell we thought ‘nude’ meant white people’s skin,” said Stamper, who has been an editor since 1998. At the time, Merriam-Webster defined “nude” as “having no clothes on of or involving people who have no clothes on having the color of a white person’s skin.” In 2015, when Buzzfeed published a video titled “Black Women Try ‘Nude’ Fashion.” Stamper watched it and was appalled, she said.Īfter watching the video, in which no Black woman found a “nude” article of clothing or makeup that matched her skin tone, Stamper went to the Merriam-Webster dictionary to find the definition of the word. Stamper said lexicographers will eventually make “cultural assumptions” about how English speakers think of certain words - especially colors - in order to create an easily-understandable definition. When lexicographers run into problematic color definitions, they have to look for technicalities. Also, deciding whether or not a certain color is the “right” color is based off one’s perception, which means it isn’t objective enough or lexicography. Color is subjective, so what someone says is taupe, a light gray color with hints of tan, for instance, may not be truly taupe. Lexicographers don’t look up color swatches for two reasons, Stamper said. The dictionary definition of color has changed along with advertising campaigns, she added, as she showed slides of 1950s clothing catalogues. To find the definition of a certain color, like blue or black, Stamper and her colleagues have to sort through computerized databases, searching for uses of the word that put it into context.īut context is relative, she said, and the language and culture surrounding the word’s definition can play into how color is perceived. “This holds even when lexicographers get into the weeds of defining concrete things that get described vaguely.” “ attempt to describe how certain words are used and what those words mean in particular sentences and contexts,” she said. ![]() She said that hunting down a definition of color is anything but black and white. Stamper, a lexicographer and an associate editor of Merriam-Webster, visited Temple Contemporary on Monday to give her first talk on defining color in the dictionary. “It’s also a little bit playful in referring to something very serious, someone slipping up and using the F-word where they should not. “It’s a very colorful and evocative word,” she told the Inquirer in 2012. Kory Stamper’s claim to fame is adding the term “F-bomb” into the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2012.
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