15-Year-Old Student Writes Apple to Fix Offensive "Gay" Definition on Dictionary

Becca Gorman, 15, Sadbury, Mass. is a student working on a research paper about gay rights when she happened to discover from her MacBook Pro dictionary its offensive definition of the word "gay."

"At first, I was kind of in disbelief," she said in an interview with the MetroWest Daily. Right before her eyes was an informal definition of "gay" as "foolish; stupid," with the example, "making students wait for the light is kind of a gay rule."

Becca, who happened to have lesbian parents, admitted that she considers the term "that's so gay" as part of a day-to-day conversation but felt disappointed that the Cupertino-based company would use it in its dictionary application with an offensive definition even if it is listed as informal.

She immediately called her parents after doing a screen cap and showed them the definition. Her parents assured her that they would support her campaign to have it removed from the dictionary app.

She wrote a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook saying:

I assume that you are a pro-gay company, and would never intend for any one of your products to be as offensive as this definition was. Even with your addition of the word informal, this definition normalizes the terrible derogatory twist that many people put on the word “gay”. ... When I look at this definition it makes this hatred filled use of the term as something as okay as “dude”.

I am asking for you to remove this definition from the Dictionary you are promoting, or to make a significant change to it. I also think it would be a good idea to apologize to the gay community, a good amount of your customers. Thank you for your cooperation, I love your products.

An hour later, an Apple representative called her and said they will look into the problem.

According to NBCNews, Apple is using an online tool linked to the New Oxford American Dictionary which happened to include offensive definitions of words.

To date, Apple has already responded to the student's request and has tagged the "gay" definition as offensive instead of informal.

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