Who knew in this day and age of digital, semantic and virtual technologies that the dictionary would turn out to the hero of the day? Digital Spy brought this news to us in their article, “Dictionary shuts down Doctor Who fans outraged over Jodie Whittaker cast as female Doctor.”
With the recent announcement that the science fiction British television series, Doctor Who, will have its very first female doctor in Jodie Whittaker, a mixed set of responses have appear throughout social media and not everyone is happy. Some people have expressed outrage about the idea that the Time Lord can be played by a woman and ridiculously argued that the Doctor has to be male because women can’t be doctors. To make matters worse, there’s an actual #nursewho hashtag.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary quickly shut down all the haters with this brilliant tweet:
Newsflash #1: doctors can be female. Newsflash #2: nurses can be male.
This comes on the heels of the online dictionary persona’s genius trolling of President Trump. Since Trump’s inauguration, the dictionary’s official Twitter handle has doubled its audience to over 550,000 followers. Between fact checking and grammar fixing, they have been kept very busy.
So kudos to the reference giant and keep on keeping us all informed and corrected.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
