A student has slammed Apple for defining gay as "foolish" and "stupid".
15-year old Becca Gorman, who is a student at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School in Massachusetts, was writing an essay on gay rights when she spotted some definitions on her MacBook Pro, which were offensive.
While looking up the definition of the term "gay" on her MacBook Pro's in-built dictionary, Gorman noticed that Apple's dictionary included "foolish" or "stupid" as the meaning.
Per the screen capture taken by Gorman of the dictionary app, the third informal definition is listed as follows:
informal foolish; stupid: making students wait for the light is kind of a gay rule.
"At first, I was kind of in disbelief," said Gorman.
Gorman also noted that she did not find any other dictionaries which used this particular definition, except to condemn it as disparaging.
Gorman's parents are lesbians and said she is used to hearing the term "that's so gay" floating around in daily conversations, but she was hurt that a "humongous company" like Apple had legitimized it in its dictionary app.
"I felt like they had to take care of it," she said.
Gorman wrote an email to Apple's CEO Tim Cook asking the company to remove the derogatory definition.
"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," she wrote. "Even with your addition of the word informal, this definition normalizes the terrible derogatory twist that many people put on the word 'gay.'"
An hour after she sent her email, Gorman received a call from an Apple representative.
"They told me it's so hard to track the dictionaries they're getting sources from, and that they were also shocked themselves," said Gorman.
Even though the representative indicated that Apple will look into the issue, the dictionary has not been altered.
"I feel like we're going to have to make a bigger deal about it before they actually act on it," she said. Apple doesn't write its own dictionaries and the one used in OS X and iOS in the U.S. is the New Oxford American Dictionary. However, soon after Gorman contacted Apple, it seems the company followed up on her complaint because now, in the latest versions of Apple's operating system, OS X Mavericks and iOS 7, both label the negative use of the word as "offensive."
