The latest update of approved words by the National Spelling Bee raised eyebrows when it included the word ‘womyn,’ an alternate of ‘women.’
The National Spelling Bee’s annual list of officially-approved words for third grade includes an addition some don’t seem to appreciate. As of this year, the organization is accepting womyn as an alternate spelling of women. The official word list includes a note that the variant is acceptable but the traditional women is still “preferred.”
Fox News reported that Scripps, the organization that runs the National Spelling Bee, had a simple explanation. It pulls words for its competition from the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary. Scripps accepts any words the unabridged dictionary recognizes and does not label as “archaic” or “obsolete.”
The dictionary includes the alternate spelling womyn. It labels it neither archaic nor obsolete. Therefore, since the dictionary recognizes it, Scripps will as well.
I don’t imagine that explanation will satisfy some of those who object to the term’s use.
‘Crazy indoctrination’?
State Rep. Samantha Poetter-Parshall, a Republican from Kansas, called it a “crazy indoctrination of our children.” Feminists have embraced that alternate spelling, it turns out, because it removes the word men from descriptions of women.
NBC Montana cites the website New Discourses’ explanation of the word’s use:
Some writers who use such alternative spellings, avoiding the suffix “-man” or “-men”, see them as an expression of female independence and a repudiation of traditions that define women by reference to a male norm. Recently, womxn has been used by intersectional feminists to indicate the same ideas, with foregrounding or more explicitly including transgender women and other marginalized women, such as women of color.
It goes on to point out that while the etymology of the words man and woman doesn’t reflect the claim, some believe woman, being a word that clearly contains man within it, implies that women is a classification derived from, and thus lesser to, man.
While I think there are far more important crises we face in our society than whether woman contains man and is therefore a “bad word,” I can understand the perception.
But I don’t see a problem with the National Spelling Bee including the alternate spelling in its word list.
If it’s treating equally all words that its authoritative source labels as valid, then fair is fair. If that’s Scripps’ policy, then so be it.
The fight isn’t with Scripps or the National Spelling Bee. It isn’t even with Merriam-Webster, because dictionaries don’t exist to be style manuals of what is or isn’t proper usage. The dictionary’s function, at its simplest level, is to define words that are being used so those who encounter them for the first time can better understand them.
If you feel womyn is some kind of “crazy indoctrination,” your gripe is with the people who are giving the word enough prominence that it made the dictionary to begin with.