Beyond the Pretty (Inter)Face

A lot of people have been sending me the link to the Visual Thesaurus lately, and it's picking up a lot of links in del.icio.us, as well. It's visually quite striking.

The first person who sent this to me, however, was my mother. And she suggested that I start by looking up the word "woman." So I did. You should, too. (I'll wait.)

Here are the meanings that the thesaurus assigns to this noun:

1. An adult female person (as opposed to a man)
2. Women as a class
3. A human female who does housework
4. (informal) A female person who plays a significant role (wife or mistress or girlfriend) in the life of a particular man.

The largest, most visually significant cluster of words shown in the visual representation focuses around "cleaning woman," and includes "charwoman," "char," and "cleaning lady" as additional terms.

I would expect something like this from an archaic dictionary...but not from a reference tool for the 21st century. This is not the definition of "woman" that I want my 7 and 9-year-old sons using as their basis for understanding gender.

Let's be careful about blindly accepting new tools--from thesauri to search engines--without thinking about the information within them, and their ability to shape perceptions.