Analyzing word usage in cosmetic product names

pudding.cool

17 points·polm23··6 comments

Oof. "It wasn’t until 2015 that Webster’s Dictionary removed the phrase 'having the color of a white person’s skin' from it’s official definition of the word nude."

I'm slight nebulous about this.

It's the dictionary's job to have the definition as it's used by society, not to create definitions itself.

A big part of the article is going into proving in quite a bit of detail how society has and continues to use "nude" to mean exactly as such; isn't it therefore the job of the dictionary to include that? Note that it's offensive, obviously, but do note it?

> It's the dictionary's job to have the definition as it's used by society, not to create definitions itself.

Yes in some respects, but correct definition is also important.

Native English speaker here. Never heard nude used that way. Always just as a synonym for naked. The existence of this now removed definition was a surprise to me.

I'm guessing you haven't bought much makeup or women's underwear.

Fair point. My wife does have "nude heels," which are (more or less) the color of a white person's naked skin. Still, I guess I didn't think that the word "nude" in "nude heels" was supposed to actually mean "the color of a white person's naked skin," but rather that nude meant "naked" and the shoe company had (wrongly and unfairly) assumed that the only people they needed to care about were white...

I'm not disagreeing and I don't have an axe to grind here, this is just anecdotal observation about language and usage in my (limited) experience.

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