In Celebration of National Dictionary Day, Women’s Media Center Launches New Online Guide to Fair and Accurate Language

New Channel Is Dedicated to the Memory of Rosalie Maggio, Feminist Linguist and Author

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

October 14, 2021

WASHINGTON, D.C.—In celebration of National Dictionary Day, the Women’s Media Center today launched a new online resource and media channel, Unspinning the Spin: The Women’s Media Center Guide to Fair and Accurate Language.

Written by Rosalie Maggio, this searchable online resource is a guide to bias-free words and phrases — their meanings, sources, backgrounds, suggested uses, and nonsexist, nonracist alternatives to biased language. Originally published as a print and digital book by the Women’s Media Center in 2014, this updated guide to language and usage is now available as a free, searchable website channel.

Julie Burton, President and CEO of the Women’s Media Center, said, “Our collaboration with Rosalie Maggio, a distinguished authority on language, means a great deal to all of us at the Women’s Media Center. Especially now, just weeks after the passing of Rosalie, it is bittersweet to launch this new language resource without her. She knew that every word mattered and that language is a powerful tool to fuel women’s equality and the work of the feminist movement. Unspinning the Spin: The Women’s Media Center Guide to Fair and Accurate Language is part of Rosalie’s important work and legacy.”

Maggio, who died on September 18, noted that “words can go viral in seconds. To communicate clearly, our language must be precise, yet many of our words are ambiguous, inaccurate, or twisted to further an agenda. Unspinning the Spin: The Women’s Media Center Guide to Fair and Accurate Language clarifies questionable terms and offers alternatives so that when we speak, listeners and readers know exactly what we mean.”

Maggio was an expert linguist who wrote 24 books, including the award-winning Dictionary of Bias-Free Usage and edited The New Beacon Book of Quotations by Women.

“Rosalie brought to Unspinning the Spin: The Women’s Media Center Guide to Fair and Accurate Language nearly 30 years of her passion for precision and style in phrasing,” said Robin Morgan, Co-Founder of the Women’s Media Center. “She was a karate master of words — a black belt and then some. We celebrate the contribution she made to social change through her understanding of the importance of language.”

“When we launched the Women’s Media Center, one of the first projects we started was a collaboration with Rosalie Maggio to publish a new and definitive guide on bias-free language,” said Gloria Steinem, Co-Founder of the Women’s Media Center. “In honor of Rosalie’s lifetime of work fighting for inclusive language and her groundbreaking work with the WMC, we are dedicating this new channel to her memory. Her dedication to fair and accurate language, her humor, her pleasure in words and their power live on in this new online guide that is not just a useful resource for scholars and laypeople, it’s fun to search and read.”

“We at the Women’s Media Center worked with Rosalie on the creation of our new website channel, Unspinning the Spin: The Women’s Media Center Guide to Fair and Accurate Language, over the last two years, and we want to thank the diverse group of advisers and organizations who have helped ensure Unspinning is as inclusive as possible. We will continue to update it as our language and the way we use it evolves,” stated Janet Dewart Bell, Chair of the Women’s Media Center.

In a 2015 interview with Robin Morgan on WMC Live with Robin Morgan, Maggio said: “Language matters desperately. Paying attention to language will not change society, but society is never going to change as long as we are encoding these prejudices in the language we use every day. Social change and language go hand in hand. We have to acknowledge the power of language and get used to choosing our words carefully.”

Unspinning the Spin: The Women’s Media Center Guide to Fair and Accurate Language can be found at https://www.womensmediacenter.com/unspinning-the-spin.

Artemis Rising Foundation and Regina K. Scully are the founding sponsors of WMC Press and Unspinning the Spin: The Women’s Media Center Guide to Fair and Accurate Language.

The Women’s Media Center, co-founded by Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan, and Gloria Steinem, is an inclusive feminist organization that works to raise the visibility, viability, and decision-making power of women and girls in media to ensure that their stories get told and their voices are heard. We do this by researching media through the WMC Media Lab; creating and modeling original online and on-air journalism; training women and girls to be effective in media; and promoting women experts in all fields through WMC SheSource.

WMC online and on-air journalism channels include the award-winning podcast and radio show WMC Live with Robin Morgan, WMC Features, WMC Women Under Siege, WMC FBomb, WMC IDAR/E, WMC Climate, and WMC Speech Project.

For more information, contact Cristal Williams Chancellor, Director of Communications, at cristal@womensmediacenter.com or 202-270-8539.