Yesterday was a heavy posting day for me. Between the Darblog and T.E.B., I count roughly twenty posts. One was a 700-word essay on gay marriage. To start, I’ll make it known that Mr. Bateman’s espousal of this technicality at the spurning of more substantive posts speaks ill of his faith in his argumentative abilities.

Gender.

It means two basic things: genre, and the technical classification of a noun as male or female in a language that divides them up thusly. English is, obviously, not one of those languages.

Mr. Bateman writes: “Joe Malchow ‘08 reveals his ignorance and presumptuousness again, getting peeved about the word ‘gender’ again.”

Using the word ‘again’ twice in a single sentence does not carry quite the flair the author might presume. Aesthetics aside, the writer of course need conduct only elementary internet research to reach a conclusion. He fails at even that task, consulting the low and witless dictionary.com for his definition.

gen·der
2. Sexual identity, especially in relation to society or culture.

If you don’t know what you’re talking about, don’t talk about it, and for God’s sake, don’t blog to the world about it.

For the record, I concur with his precept at the end. He would do well to abide by it.

If we consult a publication one notch higher in the linguistic echelon, we find that Merriam-Webster has:

1 a : a subclass within a grammatical class (as noun, pronoun, adjective, or verb) of a language that is partly arbitrary but also partly based on distinguishable characteristics (as shape, social rank, manner of existence, or sex) and that determines agreement with and selection of other words or grammatical forms b : membership of a word or a grammatical form in such a subclass c : an inflectional form showing membership in such a subclass

2 a : SEX (the feminine gender) b : the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex

The definition I argue against, 2a, is at the bottom. Perhaps that merits further investigation. We sojourn to O.E.D., the supreme arbiter.

1. Kind, sort, class; also, genus as opposed to species. the general gender: the common sort (of people). Obs.
b. the nervous gender: the nervous system [= F. le genre nerveux].

2. Gram. Each of the three (or in some languages two) grammatical ‘kinds’, corresponding more or less to distinctions of sex (and absence of sex) in the objects denoted, into which substantives are discriminated according to the nature of the modification they require in words syntactically associated with them… [Emphasis mine.]
b. By some recent philologists applied, in extended sense, to the ‘kinds’ into which ns. are discriminated by the syntactical laws of certain languages the grammar of which takes no account of sex.

3. transf. Sex. Now only jocular.
b. In mod. (esp. feminist) use, a euphemism for the sex of a human being, often intended to emphasize the social and cultural, as opposed to the biological, distinctions between the sexes. Freq. attrib.

4. Product, offspring, generation. Obs. rare.

And there have we the answer. Only jocular. In modernity. By feminists. A euphemism. Last in the dictionary, noted as a permutation. ‘Gender’ does not mean ‘sex’, which is what I argued in the very first post. The Oxford English Dictionary confirms, noting that certain factions have ascribed to the word their own meaning. But literary and true English it is not.

Note also that the ‘societal mores’ definition is accorded similarly little respect. That is the masculine/feminine definition. It, too, is a recent adulteration.