Review of Turton (2024): Before the Word was Queer: Sexuality and the English Dictionary, 1600–1930

Abstract

The first secure attestations of the English word queer, as noun and as adjective, with reference to sexuality, appear to be from 1914, and that fact helps to explain the somewhat enigmatic title of this book. Its primary texts are monolingual English dictionaries compiled before the word queer was widely available in this sense, from the Table alphabeticall of Robert Cawdrey (1537/8-1604?) to the first Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED 1933), and it gives an account of how they treated, or failed to treat, words which represented what might now be called queer sexualitywith the proviso that 'What is queer in the twentieth or twenty-first century might not have been in the nineteenth' (p. 8).A source which Turton cites several times calls for a "Critical Lexicographical Discourse Studies" which will "expose and seek remedies against social/ cultural inequalities and injustices" by "looking into and revealing the hidden power relations in lexicographical practice" (Chen 2019: 368). More specifically, he writes that his book "takes its cue from the research tradition of queer linguistics" (p. 4), a field in which there has, since the first decade of the present century, been "a continued rise in studies challenging and critiquing dominant cultural norms associated with gender and sexuality" (Jones 2021: 19). As these words may suggest, "the sights of queer linguistics have been trained more often on the current moment than the last century", and Turton identifies "doing queer linguistic history" as therefore an emerging field (p. 197). He cites the anthropologist and linguist William Leap as another worker in this field, and Leap writes one of the endorsements on the back cover, stating that Before the Word Was Queer "uses a scavenger methodology to expose privileged voices repeatedly erasing references to marginalized sexuality in English dictionaries". The words which he italicizes are a quotation from the scholar of gender studies Jack Halberstam: "A queer methodology, in a way, is a scavenger methodology that uses different methods to collect and produce information on subjects who have been deliberately or accidentally excluded from traditional studies of human behaviour" (1998: 13). The themes of this book include the challenge and critique of dominant cultural norms; the revealing of hidden power relations; the erasure of