WMC Press Releases

WMC Announces Publication of Unspinning the Spin

Unspinning the Spin:  The Women’s Media Center Guide to Fair and Accurate Language
Written by Rosalie Maggio
Preface by Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem
How To Say What You Mean.  And Mean What You Say.

Washington-DC—Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan -- women who brought us Ms. magazine, are pleased to announce the publication of Unspinning the Spin:  The Women’s Media Center Guide to Fair and Accurate Language by Rosalie Maggio. 

“Words have been used to start wars, to seduce or antagonize, to spread misinformation or to convey urgent truths,” said Unspinning the Spin’s author Rosalie Maggio. “And today, words can go viral in seconds. To communicate clearly, our language must be precise, yet many of our words are ambiguous, inaccurate, or twisted to further an agenda. Unspinning the Spin clarifies questionable terms and offers alternatives so that when we speak, listeners and readers know exactly what we mean.”

By combining eye-opening facts plus wit, Unspinning the Spin helps you decode the hype and say what you actually mean.  Consumers and creators of media are the most obvious beneficiaries, but everyone can benefit from this timely guide on the background, current uses, accuracy, nonbiased alternatives, and best practices for choosing and de-coding commonly used words and phrases.

In the preface, Morgan and Steinem write, “We’re especially grateful for this elastic, dynamic, genderless English language, in which a noun like ‘table’ can simply be ‘it,’ and we don’t have to attribute sex to chairs and pens.” 

Unspinning the Spin is a guide to words and phrases — their meanings, sources, backgrounds, suggested uses, and nonsexist, nonracist alternatives. This book goes beyond the scope of a dictionary or thesaurus. Organized alphabetically for easy use, with cross-references to related words, phrases, and issues, it mines a wide variety of fields to present the background, current uses, accuracy, alternatives, and best practices for choosing and decoding common words and phrases, and offers a trove of suggestions for bias-free language.

Unspinning the Spin answers questions on key definitions and usage of words in the English language.  For instance, what does “Feminazi” mean and should we use it?  According to the book, “Rush Limbaugh began by calling feminists fascists, then shortened it to feminazi.  He would probably be hurt if anyone else used it, so don’t.”

In a time when the women’s vote is sliced and diced for every platform of commentary, the guide offers this definition of “Suffragist” – “This term describes anyone of either sex who works for the voting rights of others, especially women’s but it most often refers to a woman.  In 1912 Mark Twain wrote of suffragists: ‘For forty years they have swept an imposingly large number of unfair laws from the statute books of America.  In this brief time these serfs have set themselves free – essentially.  Men could not have done as much for themselves in that time without bloodshed, at least they never have, and that is an argument that they didn’t know how.’ “

Unspinning the Spin: The Women’s Media Center’s Guide to Fair and Accurate Language is available in print from WMC Press on Amazon.com or womensmediacenter.com, or in e-book format distributed by Open Road Integrated Media on Amazon Kindle, Apple iTunes, Nook, Google eBookstore and Sony Kobo.

The author, Rosalie Maggio, has been an expert and widely read authority on language for more than 25 years. She is the author of the award-winning Dictionary of Bias-Free Usage and the editor of The New Beacon Book of Quotations by Women.

Artemis Rising Foundation and Regina K. Scully are the founding sponsors of WMC Press. 

The Women’s Media Center, co-founded by Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan, and Gloria Steinem, works to make women visible and powerful in media. The Women’s Media Center trains women leaders to be in the media; promotes women experts to the media through WMC SheSource; conducts groundbreaking research and reporting on media inclusion and accuracy; features women’s voices and stories on our radio program Women’s Media Center Live with Robin Morgan and through WMC Features, WMC Fbomb, and WMC Women Under Siege. Reports and content are available at womensmediacenter.com

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Update 2020: Unspinning the Spin is now a searchable online resource. You can find it here.

Unspinning the Spin is no longer available in book form.



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