“Mansplain” Was Just Announced As Macquarie Dictionary’s Word Of The Year
We asked the dictionary's editor about the history of the term.
This morning, Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary announced that ‘mansplain’ has been chosen by committee as Word of the Year 2014, with ‘share plate’ winning the People’s Choice.
The committee — a smattering of academics, alongside arts editor Catriona Menzies-Pike, journalist and author John Birmingham, and Macquarie Dictionary’s editor Susan Butler — chose their favourite from a list of new words added that year, including “binge-watching”, “emoji”, “green electricity”, and the universally-deplored “selfie stick”.
One of the other terms was “loom band”, which appears to be some kind of fashion accessory for children.
“The reactions go from, ‘This has been around forever, how come it’s taken so long for it to get into the dictionary’ to, ‘I’ve never heard of this word in my life, do people make these words up?'” says Butler. “It just depends where you’re positioned in society, as to whether you’ve encountered the word or not.”
Take “mansplain”, for instance. While the term’s coinage is commonly attributed to Rebecca Solnit, who had a portion of her essay ‘Men Explain Things To Me’ published by the LA Times in April 2008 (one of the most re-posted pieces she’s ever written, Solnit says), she never actually used the phrase in that essay. According to that bastion of truth, Know Your Meme, “mansplain” first reared its head a month later, in the comments section of a Live Journal blog called — wait for it — Fandom_Wank. The specific post was called ‘Women Who Hate Dean Hating Women Hating… wait.’ and the comment was this:
The usage grew slowly but steadily for a few years, but really picked up in the middle of 2012. In ‘A Cultural History Of Mansplaining‘, Atlantic writer Lily Rothman argues it was politics itself — in particular the kings of the mansplain, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan — that brought it to the mainstream, but the word wasn’t political in origin. After all, she point outs, “men have been talking about the female experience since basically forever.”
SATURDAY: TODAY SOME NECKBEARD WEARING A TRILBY THEY MISTAKENLY THINK IS A FEDORA WILL MANSPLAIN ANIME ON THE INTERNET
— belinda carbuncle (@Ketamine_Stalin) January 17, 2015
The Macquarie’s editor agrees, pointing out that the term — which is a go-to phrase online in particular, now often deployed in response to all manner of privilege explaining — had more humble origins. “Looking at the history of ‘mansplain’, it came into being first, and then was adopted by feminists — in America particularly — and given a particular edge. But it really came in as a sort of humourous aside, an exasperation, so there was no feminist tinge to it, initially,” Butler says. “And indeed, in most situations in which it’s used in Australia I’ve not been conscious of any kind of feminist drive. Just of people feeling that, ‘Yeah, this is a situation that does arise, and this is a very neat way of capturing it.'”
An honorable mention for ‘Word Of The Year’ went to “bamboo ceiling” — “a barrier created by prejudice which hampers the progress of Asian Australians to position of leadership” — but Butler denies the new inclusions are political choices. “With ‘mansplaining’, it does seem to be a word that some people respond to very strongly,” she says. “But I think people just felt it was a word that summed up a very common social situation, and was quite neatly put together. Of course, there are variations on the theme too, like ‘whitesplain’ in America. And I wonder if there could be a variation that covers the situation where you speak very loudly to foreigners so they can understand you. Loudsplain, or foreignsplain — that’s not nearly as neat.”
‘What the housewives of Australia need to understand as they do the ironing…” IM GOING TO STAB SOMETHING. WHY WOULD YOU VOTE FOR THIS GUY — fiddlekris (@browfan) September 7, 2013
Butler’s second choice for Word of the Year? “Life-hacking,” she answers. “There was a lot of enthusiasm for that as well. It sits in a little cluster of words, like ‘de-clutter’… There is this real move to simplify a complicated way of living, and to get around problems. So the computer hack has been adopted as a metaphor for arriving at an ingenious improvised solution to something that’s giving everyone a huge headache.”
Plot of The Ghostbusters reboot is actually that the women don’t even know how to bust ghosts until the ghosts mansplain ectoplasm to them
— SHOWTIME (@cynaragee) January 30, 2015