Emer O’Toole is an Irish feminist ‘academic’, specialising in… oh, I can’t be bothered to find out, I’d sooner try to arrange the cats in the road where I live, in alphabetical order. She’s got her (doubtless ethically-sourced) knickers in a twist over the use of the term ‘rabid feminist’ by Oxford Dictionaries Online, so naturally she’s penned a Guardian article about it. The first paragraph:

A Canadian anthropologist, Michael Oman-Reagan, tweeted Oxford Dictionaries last week to ask it why “rabid feminist” is its Oxford Dictionaries Online (ODO) usage example for the word “rabid”. Oxford Dictionaries responded by suggesting Oman-Regan may be a rabid feminist. It has since apologised for the “flippant” response and is reviewing the example sentence.

The ‘reviewing’ will, of course, be followed by the ‘removing’.

The ability to make a point, only to follow it with arguments of mind-numbing stupidity, is of course a characteristic of feminists. In this case, the initial point Ms O’Toole makes is a sound one. Dictionary entries don’t just reflect prejudice, they reinforce them. But in the overwhelming majority of cases where such dictionaries are prejudicial against either men or women, it’s men who suffer the prejudice. An article published yesterday by Janet Bloomfield – Is the Oxford Dictionary sexist? Why, yes. Yes it is. – made the point better than I’ve ever seen it done.

Such is the domination of the feminist thought police, that if they find even one example of wording they don’t approve of, as with ‘rabid feminist’, they’ll do whatever it takes to have it removed from the record. It’s why we moderate comments on our blogs, and take particular delight in trashing long comments from rabid feminists.