I was gobsmacked: here I was, a recent graduate of a women’s college, getting schooled on gendered language by an old guy. And rightly so: I brought to the definition my own assumptions about the gender of people who have in the past run for president. But a good lexicographer weighs the untold future as well as the told past and present: Is it so inconceivable that a woman could run for president? By assuming that the gender-neutral “he” was going to be fine here, because presidents are all men, I had committed the sin of editorialization.
