"It depends what you mean by sex": Google and Language

While researching the effects of stress on learning, I decided to look at differences between the ways male students reacted to stress and the ways female students reacted to stress. I went to Google Scholar and typed in "gender learning college stress" or similar variants of that. While doing this, I recalled that there was a difference between gender and sex, or rather, the contested nature of the definitions of the words. Ultimately, I think I'm interested in a social role rather than the levels of estrogen and testosterone one possesses.

What if I was more concerned with the biological trait and violence, and I assumed (probably wrongly) that academic writers made a distinction between gender roles and biological sex? Then I'd have to google "sex violence", which, even in the relatively porn-free ecosystem of Google scholar, would yield plenty of irrelevant results related to the act of sex, not the characteristic of sex. Really, its just a homonym problem, but its interesting to consider the role this problem plays in debates like the one over the definition of "sex" and "gender".

Perhaps in the future, searching won't be entirely contingent on individual words free of any context. Maybe search will get smarter about what we want. But in the meantime, we're in a world in which words (or names, for that matter) are at a distinct disadvantage if they refer to too many different concepts or people. Of course, the people who started the debate over the meaning of the word "sex" or the word "womyn" or many other words weren't thinking about the impact of google on the efficacy of their intervention. Again, its hard to say how long we'll be living in the word of context-less word searches, but if you're banking on it being around for awhile, it pays to use unique terms.

This leads to another problem, one that has frustrated me for years: the tendency of scholars to come up with yet another term for a concept that is subtley different from another concept we have a term for just so they can have an "original" concept to base their career and reputation on. The reverse happens, too: theorists hijack each other's terms and re-brand them, much to the confusion of students everywhere. There's a point at which this behavior leads to a breakdown in communication: are you talking about "priming" or "priming"? (or perhaps "priming"!).

The evolution of language has always been messy, and while google does bring a kind of order to our information environment, it may not be doing wonders for our languages