By Daniel Chan

Copyright channelnewsasia

‘NEUTRAL’ WORDS LOADED WITH POLITICS

Beyond what gets included, a dictionary’s lack of neutrality is most apparent in how it defines contested terms – words whose meanings are still fought over because different groups load them with competing values or politics.

Take “tradwife”. Cambridge defines it as “a married woman, especially one who posts on social media, who stays at home doing cooking, cleaning, etc, and has children that she takes care of”.

While technically accurate, this definition feels incomplete. Online, tradwives are associated with the far-right and anti-feminist narrative that women should be homemakers subservient to their husbands.

Here is the lexicographer’s dilemma. Leave the politics out, and the definition sanitises the word. Put them in, and it editorialises. Either way, the dictionary establishes the default meaning of a term – and in doing so, quietly reshapes cultural memory.

To archive “tradwife” as lifestyle, not ideology, is to strip it of its controversy. Decades from now, what was once a live struggle over gender roles risks being remembered as nothing more than a harmless aesthetic choice.

The same dynamic applies to satire. “Enshittification”, coined by tech writer Cory Doctorow in 2022 to describe the decline of online platforms – generous at first, exploitative later, and eventually collapsing under their own greed.

The word caught on because it captured an everyday reality. Anyone who has scrolled through ad-choked Instagram feeds or cluttered e-commerce apps knows the frustration. Even ride-hailing apps in Singapore that once promised convenience now draw complaints of higher prices and glitchy service.

A year ago, the Australian Macquarie Dictionary named it “Word of the Year”. Enshrined now in the Cambridge Dictionary, its function has shifted: from a funny insult to an officially recognised term.