Canadian Oxford Dictionary Defines the "Rainbow Flag"

Canadian Oxford Dictionary

rainbow flag (noun) -- a flag with horizontal stripes in the colours of the rainbow as an emblem of gay pride.

gay pride (noun) -- a sense of strong self-esteem associated with a person’s public acknowledgement of their homosexuality.


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WASHINGTON BLADE
(Homosexual News Magazine)
Washington, D.C.
August 27, 2004


Gay terms added to dictionary in Canada Oxford rewrites definition of marriage
by Adrian Brune

It comprises 1,888 pages, and defines more than 2,200 distinctly Canadian nouns, adjectives and verbs in addition to the 145,000 words in the English language.

It provides journalists, students and the common Canadian with the correct terminology when they are hungry for a “bismark” (a donut) or need to “book off” (slack off) work for a vacation from the “cube farm” (an array of office cubicles).

And now the second edition of the “Canadian Oxford Dictionary” — the country’s bestselling lexicon — includes definitions for the vernacular used by gays for years, from “gaydar” to “lipstick lesbian,” “cruisy” to “civil union.”

It also delineates the word “marriage” in much broader terms as “the legal or religious union of two people” without mentioning “a man and a woman.”

The release of the official Canadian dictionary this fall marks the first attempt to formally sanction gay-specific language and widely introduce it to the mainstream. While publishers of United States dictionaries, such as Miriam-Webster, say they will not likely follow suit for quite some time, Oxford University Press, the house behind several country-specific dictionaries, plans on keeping up-to-date with gay lingo as it progresses.

“Dictionaries just reflect what the actual reality is,” said lexicographer Tom Howell, a lexicographer with Oxford University Press Canadian Oxford.

“If a dictionary says a marriage is the union of a man and a woman, that’s just describing the fact that has been the case for hundreds of years. But if the law changes or society changes or something happens where the word ‘marriage’ comes to apply to same-sex unions, we just change the definition.”


Etymology of ‘marriage’


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