Interview With Philip Herbst Interview by Jenna Glatzer Philip Herbst is an author and editor whose previous book, The Color of Words , tackled biased language that labels racial and ethnic groups and creates division among us. A former college instructor with over twenty years of college, trade, and technical publishing, Herbst served as a visiting scholar in Gender Studies at Northwestern University while writing this book.
Color explores racial and ethnic language.
As a developmental editor of social science texts, I fielded lots of questions from authors and copyeditors about such things as the use of Native American vs. Indian or whether black should be capitalized. These questions inspired me to write a guide. Color did very well, so we decided to follow up with a dictionary of gender and sexual orientation. But even though I initially wanted something that would be useful to writers and editors, I didn t want to write a prescriptive dictionary. The broader goal has always been to describe words and their histories and to explain their different uses, shifts in meaning, and effects on people.