ABSTRACT
Lexicographers and grammarians have sex as well as gender on their minds, sometimes getting the thing wrong on their index cards, occasionally conceding and correcting an embarrassing error. The great Henry Fowler of the Oxford Dictionary assumed, as he said, “a cheerful attitude of infallibility”; but when he missed out on the sexuality of “Adultery” the faulty definition was amended. Fowler had defined it thus: “Voluntary sexual intercourse of married person with one of opposite sex.” In a time of affirmative action and equal opportunity it is the upwardly mobile female journalist who volunteers, or is conscripted, to take the rude lead. Newspapers are pioneering the offensive strategy of pushing women forward to the front—the no-man’s-land where F-words be. Modern times make do with few barns, fewer yards, and almost no farmers who expostulate in an earthy fashion all their own. Barn-yard as a locus for profane language should, perhaps, give way to schoolyard.
