Eight words that reveal the sexism at the heart of the English language
Eight words that reveal the sexism at the heart of the English language
As Oxford Dictionaries comes under fire for sexist definitions, the history of terms that refer to women shows how deep negative attitudes go
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‘I am a gentil womman and no wenche’: from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale, c1386. Photograph: Alamy
Linguists call it collocation: the likelihood of two words occurring together. If I say “pop”, your mental rolodex will begin whirring away, coming up with candidates for what might follow. “Music”, “song” or “star”, are highly likely. “Sensation” or “diva” a little less so. “Snorkel” very unlikely indeed.
What do you think of when I say the word “rabid”? One option, according to the dictionary publisher Oxford Dictionaries, is “feminist”. The publisher has been criticised for a sexist bias in its illustrations of how certain words are used. “Nagging” is followed by “wife”. “Grating” and “shrill” appear in sentences describing women’s voices, not men’s.
One of the points of Oxford Dictionaries, part of Oxford University Press (OUP), is to show how words are used in the real world. And that is their response to allegations of sexism. “The example sentences we use are taken from a huge variety of different sources and do not represent the views or opinions of Oxford University Press,” they said in a statement. In other words, it’s not the dictionary that’s sexist, it’s the English-speaking world. Why choose “feminist” over, say, “rightwinger”, “communist” or “fan”, though? As if not quite convinced by its own explanation, the OUP is now “reviewing the example sentence for ‘rabid’ to ensure that it reflects current usage”.
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Language, as the medium through which we conduct almost all relationships, public and private, bears the precise imprint of our cultural attitudes. The history of language, then, is like a fossil record of how those attitudes have evolved, or how stubbornly they have stayed the same.
When it comes to women, the message is a depressing one. The denigration of half of the population has embedded itself in the language in ways you may not even be aware of. Often this takes the form of “pejoration”: when the meaning of the word “gets worse” over time. Linguists have long observed that words referring to women undergo this process more often than those referring to men. Here are eight examples:
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These eight words show how social conditions leave their mark on the language. The process of pejoration may take place below the level of consciousness, but in historical perspective, the direction of travel is obvious. Have the achievements of the feminist movement percolated down through the many layers of our language? The Oxford Dictionaries controversy suggests not. Can the words we use to describe women avoid the fate of hussy, mistress and courtesan? There’s hope, but only time will tell.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/27/eight-words-sexism-heart-english-language
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Unconvoluted to make a point that otherwise isn't so clear.
Take "governess." The word's simply not used that much, so it has pretty much zero impact. However, it kept its meaning as the female equivalent of governor. It's primary restriction wasn't linguistic but in terms of reality: What women governed was less than what men governed. "Guvnor" was the lord of the estate or household. A governess might be in charge of a girls' or women's institution, but those were infrequent and vanished for the most part in the last 100 years--and with it, the usage in current speech. But with the rise of the middle class, the woman hired to handle the kids (to free up the housewife) was given more duties and governed the household to a large extent. The word followed reality.
The US hadn't this development. It fairly early lost the word "governess" because the referent vanished or never existed.
"Hussy" had an intermediate meaning between "huswife" and "disreputable woman." As a gentlewoman as housewife acquired other titles, "housewife" stopped being much of a title. It came to mean "low SES housewives," which tended to be loud and unmannered. So to refer to a lady or well-bred woman as a "housewife" was to call her unmanned, uncouth, loud. We still have those titles and the word "housewife" isn't a title.
Just as "housewife" underwent phonetic erosion to become hussy, so the word "mistress" likewise changed. It's now "Misses", and is kept as a title for a respectable housewife (or, in fact, anybody married, with "Miss", another form of "mistress," likewise kept as a good title).
Beware the phrase "is used to mean." Often when a word has multiple meanings it is "used to mean" one of them, as well as the others. It merely says, "It (also) has that meaning." So "wench" for a long time after Chaucer did not mean just "wanton woman". It was also a simply non-respectful way to refer to a woman. Now it's pretty much gone--like courtesan (seldom a common word) or infrequent (like "madam"
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Notice, moreover, a common refrain. The words are infrequent or, if used, are limited in use or jocular. (Who seriously calls a woman a "wench" without doing so self-consciously?) This is due to a variety of reasons--some social, some because the referents no longer exist or are no longer common. Much of the change at the heart of what are billed as current attitudes and showing current thinking happened 2-400 years ago, while the changes that presumably don't reflect current thinking and attitudes are recent. This is a problem with the logic. Even at the end, where this peaks up a bit out of the morass, there's a statistical problem: We want to see a strong and clear signal showing up for the last 20 years, preferably that reaches back and cleanses the past. Recent signals are hard to see in linguistic time; and they can't revise the past, ever, however much we like to hide the past to keep our delicate sensibilities from being offended. It's best to clepen old things what they were y-clept, and call new things what they're called. Works like the OED avoid being trendy. What used to be true with bibliographic references is still true with good, well-founded dictionaries: It's easy to find out something from 80 years ago, it's harder to find out what happened last week.
Pejoration isn't a linguistic problem; it's a social and cultural problem. It's paralleled in forms like "negro" and "colored" and "Afro-American" and "African-American" (or the parallel sorts of terms for homosexuals, esp. male--but not so much female). So I've had student offended by the 1920s use of "colored" willfully unaware of its status in English, esp. British English, at the time. The changes in connotation parallel what people think--and given that we're perfectly happy to ditch and re-form words as attitudes change, they can stop happening and even reverse course fairly quickly when attitudes change.
What is disturbing in this kind of article is the deep-seated opinion on the part of some humanities folk and mindlessly derivative social science minions that language determines thinking. It can get in the way, to be sure, but experiments over the last 60 years to control language in order to control thinking have proven to be abysmal failures, whether in the linguistics literature or in society. Attempts to control and manipulate the population--lets not put icing on the turd--by controlling the language just don't work unless society gets on board. Then typically speakers merely tweak other words to express their meaning and those "other words" now need to be expunged to preserve the purity of mind control that's needed. There's also this downright retrograde attitude that languages are unitary and uniform, when in fact a lot of the changes reflected in these "8 words" started in one social dialect and either spread or failed to spread but still continued on. Often social change happens in one place and spreads as those held in respect adopt new attitudes and as those in multiple networks enable the spread. I do believe the Milgrams in the '70s did a good job looking at sociolinguistic principles of language change, I just rephrased it for societal changes.
Meanwhile, society changes apace and with it, language. So as gays became acceptable, even among those who despise homosexuals the word "gay" has lost most of its pejorative meaning. This change didn't happen uniformly everywhere in all social dialects--so as among educated adults "gay" was losing any derogation it became trendy among some kids. The derogatory and sexual meanings were even reaching homophone status at one point among such speakers ("That's gay" didn't necessary mean "homosexual," and even started to come out as "That's goy" in some smaller regions, while "gay = homosexual" stayed "gay" . I recently heard somebody non-judgmentally read aloud something containing the word "homo" and was stunned by how archaic and retrograde it sounded; other faces showed the same surprise. (The person who wrote that spoke up fairly quickly to point out that his handwriting was bad and the word was 'hobo', why would he disrespect himself, after all--which told the group present his sexual orientation, a non-surprise and topic of utter non-interest, either that he hadn't spread the info before nor thought it worth hiding.) We'll leave out the classist assumptions in that particular bit of discourse.
