Seminal and Germinal: A Study in Progression and Retrogression

Bridget Crawford's post on Leslie M. Rose's new article, "The Supreme Court and Gender-Neutral Language: Setting the Standard or Lagging Behind?" reminds me that I should re-post an entry I put up a few years back at blackprof....

I can date well some of the minor transformations in consciousness in my life.  One of them was in my third year of law school when I was standing in a hallway in my school, reading a report on classroom bias that the women’s law caucus had prepared.  The report was posted on a bulletin board; I guess these days it would be emailed to us all.  One brief and anonymous comment was along the lines of: “Professors use the word seminal a lot.  I would prefer they use germinal.” A reasonable request, I thought.  (Though now I’m led to believe that perhaps “radical” is the best alternative.)  “Seminal” is one of those fifty-cent words that would be too fancy for someone like me to ever think about using (though I might quote it).

I have, however, had a few conversations about it.  Usually the conversations arose when I was commenting on a manuscript and said something along the lines of, “some people may find that word disquieting.”  One of those conversations happened a couple of years ago with a colleague of mine.  We talked a little about the critique of the word; he was, well, surprised and set about searching for it.  He found it in some unlikely places, like women’s law journals.

So that set me to thinking, has the frequency of the use of seminal changed over time?  I thought I’d study this the easy way, so I used the Westlaw journals and law reviews database and searched for instances of "germinal" and "seminal" in 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, and 2005.  The table below presents the results of the number of articles in each year that use each word at least once.  What I don’t know is how much the size of the database changes over time.  (My apologies to our friends over at elsblog for not knowing the denominator.)  Though it seems that while the use of germinal’s grown modestly (increasing by three times), seminal has grown by about five times.

                        

        Germinal        Seminal   

1985        5                314        

1990        10              637       

1995        19            1102       

2000        20            1395       

2005        17            1788

That led me to thinking about the Supreme Court as well.  Germinal has not been used in the Supreme Court since 1984 (at least as of November 2006 when I wrote this post).  The second-to-last time it was used was in Bakke.  Seminal was mentioned by the Supreme Court in 7 cases in 1985, 2 in 1990, 0 in 1995, 2 in 2000 and 1 in 2005. 

Comments

[Jeff Lipshaw]

I really wonder whether there's bias (conscious or unconscious) in words that have so evolved from their etymological roots. My highly educated wife uses "terrific!" all the time as a response to a good news, yet it is the adjectival form of "terror." (Just looking at the word "terror" by the way, I assume it has its roots in "terre-" or earth, making me wonder if it has something to do with quakes, chasms, or netherworlds!)

That's not to minimize gender bias in language, or our increased sensitivity to it. One of my course is Agency, Partnership, and LLC, in which the Uniform Partnership Act of 1914 is a mainstay, and it's always a little weird to listen to the repeated male genderisms, even as I'm saying them in class.

[Matthew Reid Krell]

I'm not convinced these two words are interchangeable. Perhaps their very lack of interchangeability is a sign of gender bias, but "germinal" means "being in the earliest stage of development," (dictionary.com, definition 1); the nearest definition for "seminal" is "having possibilities of future development" (which is the same source's definition 3!). I suspect, however, that most scholars use "seminal" in the sense of definition 4, "highly original and influencing the development of future events," a definition without equivalent for "germinal."

I guess I'm sort of more forcefully making Jeff's point, which is that words evolve and their etymological roots don't necessarily have bearing on their modern usage. That said, I would not be surprised to find some gender bias in the fact that "seminal" can be used to replace "early and vital," whereas "germinal" can only be used to replace "original." The one implies importance, whereas we see from Derek Sivers' "Dancing Guy" that being the "original" (or if you prefer, germinal) only matters if someone follows you. In short, being seminal implies being germinal, but not vice versa - which may or may not be evidence of gender bias.

[Matthew Reid Krell]

Almost forgot the link to the dancing guy:

http://sivers.org/ff