Customer Reviews

Websters' First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Mary Daly does it again! She manages to skewer dead and dying institutions in remarkably few words. For example: "bubble n: an artificial total environment which distances, destroys and replaces the physical/spiritual Elemental world; an Eye-sore/I-sore. Examples: disneyworld; the bible." Lest you think this is all negative, delight in "Be-Witching: leaping/hopping/flying inspired by Lust for Metamorphosis...the exercise of Labrys-like powers." Nice pictures, too. A must-have for the Feminist who needs a chuckle or a good quote from time to time. Definitely a keeper!

This book definitely takes you where you want to go...far, far away from anything Patriarchal ... It's a wild adventure so hang on... up, up and away~! Hurray~!

I was lucky as a budding witch to find a copy of this. I began to think about the words I used in ritual in a whole new way. The concept of deciding how we interact with reality through speech is only now coming into study by modern chaos, memetic & mnemonic magicians. Ms. Daly, as always, ahead of us on the curve, pointing out the sights we shouldn't miss.

Mary Daly (1928-2010) was a radical feminist philosopher and theologian who taught at Jesuit-run Boston College for 33 years; she retired in 1999, after a discrimination claim was filed against the college by two male students who claimed to want to be admitted to her advanced Womens Studies courses. She also wrote the books The Church and the Second Sex, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy, Outercourse: The Be-Dazzling Voyage, QUINTESSENCE: Realizing the Archaic Future A Radical Elemental Feminist Manifesto, and Amazon Grace: Re-Calling the Courage to Sin Big.

She wrote in the Preface to this 1987 book, "The 'Wickedary' is a Metadictionary, that is a 'Metaphysical dictionary, written by and for Wicked/Wiccen Websters; dictionary that Gossips out the Elemental webs of words hidden in partriarchal dictionaries and other re-sources.' Thus the 'Wickedary' is an entirely New Work. At the same Time, it is Ancient/Archaic. Many of the words contained in this book were Dis-covered in my earlier Word-Works..."

Here are some additional quotations from the book:

"The Wickedary is a declaration that words and women have served the fathers' sentences long enough. Websters ride the rhythms of Tidal Time, freeing words." (Pg. 3)
"Clearly, 'Gyn/Ecology' does not sound like mere gynecology, nor does Crone-ology sound like chronology, for multileveled meanings are Heard and Said by Pronouncing Sibyls." (Pg. 37)
"bull, papal... the most sacred form of bull." (Pg. 187)
"pope John Paul Too as; pop patriarch of the 1980s who uses the electronic media to proclaim his love for souls; granite-jawed, white-robed superstar who made his 1979 debut as visiting Queen of Heaven... Male Mother of the Decade." (Pg. 195-196)
"family, patriarchal... primary unit of the sadosociety, consisting of slaves organized in domestic and sexual service to a snool as their head." (Pg. 197)
"full-osopher... one who fails to seek wisdom, having deluded himself that he possesses it: academic stuffed shirt." (Pg. 202)
"The man-dated world is clockracy---the society that is dead set by the clocks and calendars of fathered time." (Pg. 279)

While I realize that this book is intended to be a humorous look at the English language, it still doesn't excuse the mean-spirited male-bashing in which Daly engages.

The first two-thirds of the book were indeed fun (hence the extra ratings star). Any attempt to experiment and play with words is great; and trying to bolster women's courage and laughingly shove them into redefining themselves on their own terms--all the better!

But why trash men? Daly's definition of heterosexual relationships as being instigated only by men towards women is not only incorrect but insulting. One could almost accuse Daly of being heterophobic, and isn't bigotry supposed to be wrong? I guess all those loving, ethical, funny, and caring fathers/sons/brothers/friends are just figments of a sadly benighted race of "fembots" and "totalled women".

In a word, infantile. While Mary Daly certainly has all the rhetorical flair with which her disciples credit her, this gift of the gab is too often used to justify an essentially close-minded viciousness which leaves any attempt at actually useful philosophy in the dust. It's strange that Daly so consistently castigates the rhetorical abuses of the patriarchy (which are, I absolutely agree, often horrifying) while failing to perform any better in this, her answer to male-determined language. Worse, while she claims to represent all *true* feminists, her argument for this claim is to simply recategorize any feminist who dares to disagree with her as a 'fembot', a brainless casualty of patriarchy. She appears either unable to get over the very paradigms of violent hierarchy which she claims to oppose, or else is somehow under the gross missapprehension that a cycle of violence is somehow to be prefferred to actual progress for feminism or society at large. D+.