One of the more bizarre woke accidents in recent memory comes courtesy of the Dᴜᴅᴇɴ, Germany's equivalent to the Oxꜰᴏʀᴅ Eɴɢʟɪsʜ Dɪᴄᴛɪᴏɴᴀʀʏ. Until 1996, its editors used to have the power to bindingly determine the rules of German grammar; but for all intents and purposes it still is the official German dictionary, remaining in use by government and people alike.
Now, you may or may not know German uses the generic masculine. There aren't many English nouns with which to easily illustrate this practice, but one would be: 'actor'. In German, an 'actor' could mean both a male and female. Gender-appropriate declension ('actress') became a thing only a few decades ago. ('Actress' denotes only a defined individual, though: That random woman over there is an 'actor', Gal Gadot over here is (allegedly) an 'actress'.)
German feminists have been pestering the public to ditch the generic masculine altogether. (Obviously, the grammatical
genus has nothing to do with biological gender but try explaining that to a feminist.) So, unlike in English where e.g. a female cop would insist on being called 'officer' rather than 'policewoman' it's the other way around: They want "their" nouns.
And wouldn't you know it, the Dᴜᴅᴇɴ recently caved in to the pressure and extended the official German vocabulary by a mind-numbing 10,000 nouns. They've added a female counterpart of every noun, as if the declined one wasn't merely a variant of the generic masculine but a word in its own right (it isn't). They also reworked the generic
masculina to incorrectly state they only define males: For example,
became
So far, so boring. However, not only has this reform been drawing the ire of the "excluded" trans-community, it's also created the amusing situation that the quasi-official dictionary of the German language is now brimming with glaring mistakes revealing the error of their ways. That's because those bumbling morons forgot to double-check their bloody sample sentences.
For instance, the definition of 'supplier' (Lieferant) used to be:
Now, the definition goes as this:
And the sample sentence underneath reads:
Spot the mistake? Just insert the definition given above:
So far, folks have spotted more than 500 mistakes like this. ?
yle.fi
