A “wheelchair dude” in our Macs

Our daughter Rachel brought to her family’s attention the item above, found in the digital version of the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus (1st edition), standard software on a Mac. When I read the sentence that caught Rachel’s eye — “I observed this wheelchair dude in the vestibule waiting for me” — I was baffled. I wrote back: This is in our computers?! Sure enough, it is. Our son Ben said I should write about it.

Apple’s not responsible for this sentence of course. Oxford University Press is. As Rachel discovered, the sentence has been noticed before, in the spirit of ha! and WTF. But there’s nothing, really, that’s funny here, aside perhaps from the incongruity of dude and vestibule appearing in the same sentence. As Rachel points out, the phrase “wheelchair dude” is the exact opposite of what’s called person-first language, phrasing that takes care not to equate a person with a condition. (Consider, for example, the difference between “He’s LD” and “He has a learning disability.”) Contra Wikipedia’s article on person-first language (written or revised by an expert in ax-grinding), that kind of care in language is hardly a matter of “politically correct linguistic prescriptivism.” It’s really little more than respectful common sense.

What were those Oxford dudes smoking?