I made the most appalling discovery yesterday at work. K. and I were in my office, writing ad copy for books and music, and we had been working on the copy for a book about marriage. We had already used the word marriage about three times in about seven sentences, so we decided to see if there was another word we could use in its place for the sake of variety.
I have the Merriam-Webster dictionary on my computer, so I pulled it up, typed in marriage, and started reading. I didn't find any good synonyms, but I did discover this as the second definition: "the state of being united to a person of the same sex in a relationship like that of a traditional marriage (same-sex marriage)."
When did this become an official definition for marriage? There is only one state in the United States that has legalized same-sex marriage (Massachusetts--the home of such stalwart people as Ted Kennedy and Barney Frank), so that would hardly qualify same-sex marriage as a widely accepted concept. And what's more, when did we start adding adjectival phrases to the beginning of marriage: "same-sex" marriage, "gay" marriage, "homosexual" marriage? Back in those radical sixties when I was growing up--as far as I know--it was just "marriage." At least it was in Wauseon, Ohio.
And now I realize that this is just one more thing that I have to protect my children from. When I was growing up, I was often told to "look it up" by teachers and parents when I had a question about a word's definition. And then as a teacher and parent myself, I was frequently sending students and my own children to dictionaries with their questions about spelling and definitions. Who would have ever thought the dictionary could be such a dangerous place?
