Top Quotes: “Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language” — Amanda Montell
Introduction
“Old English is spoken in Britain until 1066 AD, when the Duke of Normandy (aka William the Conqueror, aka a terrifying little man with a long, gray beard and a fabulous bejeweled crown) invades England, murders a bunch of people, and brings along with him an early form of French. For the few hundred years that follow, there is a sort of linguistic class divide in Britain, where the poor speak English and the rich speak French. But then the black death sweeps through and kills off about a third of the population. This makes the working class way more important to the country’s economy, and by the fourteenth century, English is the dominant language of Britain again. But at this point, the language, heavily influenced by French, has evolved into a new form called Middle English.”
“In my college sociolinguistics classes, I started learning about some of the subtle ways gender stereotypes are hiding in English…like how the term penetration implies (and reinforces) the idea that sex is from the male perspective. Like sex is defined as something a man does to a woman. The opposite might be envelopment or enclosure. Can you imagine how different life would be if that’s how we referred to sex? If women were linguistically framed as the protagonists of any given sexual scenario, could that potentially mean that a woman’s orgasm as opposed to a dude’s would be seen as the proverbial climax.”
Insults
“A similar survey of gendered insults conducted at UCLA the year before found that approximately 90 percent of all recorded slang words for women were negative, compared to only 46 percent of recorded words for men. That means there were simply more insults for females in people’s everyday lexicon than there were for males. The survey also found a range of “positive” terms for women, but most of them were still sex-themed, like the insults, often comparing women to food: peach, treat, filet.”
“In some instances, the process of pejoration rebrands a feminine word as an insult not for women but for men. Take the words buddy and sissy: Today, we might use sissy to describe a weak or overly effeminate man, while buddy is a synonym for a close pal. We don’t think of these words as being related, but in the beginning, buddy and sissy were abbreviations of the words brother and sister. Over the years, the masculine term ameliorated as the feminine term went the other way, flushing down the semantic toilet until it plunked onto its current meaning: a man who is weak and pathetic, just like a woman.”
“When Homo sapiens lived nomadic lifestyles, wandering from place to place, men and women all had multiple sexual partners and female sexuality was considered totally normal and great. It wasn’t until humans stopped moving that women with sexual independence started gaining a bad rap, because once owning land became desirable, people wanted to be able to pass it down to their children, and in order for men to know who their children were, female monogamy became a must. To create a system of inheritance, societies became patriarchal, and any remaining notions of goddess-like sexual liberation went kaput. With the end of women’s sexual liberation came a general disgust for female sexuality, dooming words like cunt forever. (Or until the end of patriarchy, at least.)
Spiritually, reading all about these words’ pejoration is a bit of a bummer, but empirically, the patterns say something important about our culture’s gender standards at large: when English speakers want to insult a woman, they compare her to one of a few things: a food (tart), an animal (bitch), or a sex worker (slut).”
“ChI Lu, a computational linguist and language columnist at JSTOR Daily, once made the point that the purpose of name-calling is to accuse a person of not behaving as they should in the eyes of the speaker. The end goal of the insult is to shape the recipient’s actions to fit the speaker’s desired image of a particular group.”
“AAVE is responsible for treasured slang terms as new as squad, fleek, and woke, and as old as bling-bling, the use of bad to mean good, and the phrase 24–7. (Sonja Lanehart, a University of Texas linguist, once told me that the first time she heard a white news anchor use the phrase 24–7 on TV, she nearly spat out her drink.)”
“Look at what happened with the word suffragette: We no longer think of this term as an insult, but originally, it was invented as a demeaning version of the word suffragist (a Latin-derived term meaning a person of any gender who aims to extend voting rights). When suffragette was first coined, it was intended as a diminutive smear for women’s liberation activists in the early twentieth century: suffragettes were husbandless hags who dared to want the vote. The women’s lib movement was obviously far from perfect (it pretty much only benefited rich white ladies), but what was cool linguistically was that those women immediately stole the word suffragette, put it up on posters, shouted it through the streets, named their political magazine after it, and now most English speakers have entirely forgotten that it was ever meant as a slur.”
“It’s why terms like old maid and spinster seem passé — because, as of the twenty-first century, so does the idea of criticizing a woman for being over the age of forty and unmarried. Simply put, slurs go out of style at the same time the underlying belief in them does.”
“The corpus data also showed that the noun form of female is almost never used in a positive context. You wouldn’t hear someone say, “My best friend is the kindest, most generous female I have ever met.”
Why, when aiming to make a disparaging comment about a woman, do speakers often choose to use the word female? Cameron postulates that it might have something to do with the desire to point out that women are flawed by biological design. The implication is that female, a scientific term used to describe bodies throughout the animal kingdom, refers to one’s sex (one’s genitalia, chromosomes, gonads, and other reproductive body parts) Meanwhile, woman, a term only used to describe humans, refers to gender, a culturally invented and much more complex concept (which we’ll attempt to define in a bit). By choosing to label someone a “stupid, crazy female,” it suggests that the subject’s intellectual flaws are connected to her vulva, XX chromosomes, uterus, etc., as if the very sex classification of her body is responsible for these negative traits.”
Language Development
“Believe it or not, gender didn’t enter the mainstream English lexicon until the late twentieth century. According to the Corpus of Historical American English, which contains a massive four hundred million words from the 1810s to the 2000s, most people didn’t start using the word gender to describe human beings until the 1980s.”
“The Buginese people of Indonesia recognize five genders: women, men, calalai, calabai, and bissu. Calalai are assigned female at birth (AFAB) and embody a masculine gender identity; calabai are AMAB and embody a feminine gender identity. Bissu are “transcendent gender,” meaning they encompass all of these identities, serving key roles in Buginese traditions, and are sometimes equated with priests.
In the Native American Zuni tribe, a third gender called lhamana — also described as mixed-gender or Two-Spirit — encompasses people who live as both men and women simultaneously. Two-Spirits are AMAB but wear a mixture of men’s and women’s clothing and mostly perform traditional women’s work, like pottery and cooking. One of the most famous Two-Spirits was a figure named We’wha, who served as the Zuni ambassador to the United States in the late 1800s. We’wha spent six months in Washington, DC, where she was reportedly beloved by the establishment. Those white government bros had no idea We’wha wasn’t a “woman” by their standards; as far as they could tell, that word fit her. But back among the Zunis, We’wha went by a totally different label.”
“In 2017 Vice documented two kindergarteners in Sweden who were AMAB but have gender-neutral names, long hair, and are allowed to play with whatever toys they like, from dinosaurs to nail polish, without gender associations. In Sweden, enforcing gender stereotypes in schools has actually been illegal since 1998. Instead, the government funds gender-neutral kindergartens, where you’ll find teachers saying “friends” instead of “boys” and “girls”; lessons are taught using gender-neutral mediums, like nature and modeling clay; toy animals replace baby dolls; and characters in books are pictured defying traditional gender roles (female pirates; lesbian queens ruling a kingdom; Batman wearing a baby in a sling around his torso).”
“Women’s conversations also have a distinctive turn-taking structure — a style of talk that Coates likens to a musical jam session. “The defining characteristic of a . . . jam session,” she says, “is that the conversational floor is potentially open to all participants simultaneously.” In such conversations, you might hear overlapping talk, speakers repeating one another, or rephrasing each other’s words. Everyone is working together to construct meaning, and thus the one-speaker-at-a-time rule does not apply. “Simultaneous speech does not threaten comprehension,” Coates explains, “but on the contrary permits a more multilayered development of topics.”
This jam session structure is something you rarely find in exchanges among men. In fact, Coates has found that one of the most defining characteristics of men’s conversations, one that helps maintain its hierarchical structure, is that they tend to happen in alternating monologues, or stretches of talk where one speaker holds the floor for a lengthy period of time without any interruptions, not even in the form of minimal responses. This is a way for a speaker to “play the expert,” or display their individual knowledge of a subject. “Because most men most of the time choose a one-at-a-time model of turn-taking, overlap is interpreted as deviant, as an (illegitimate) attempt to grab the floor,” Coates explains. For this reason, men sometimes interpret women’s jam session-style overlaps as rude intrusions.”
“As for why women tend to talk to one another in this collaborative style: Scholars have posed a few theories. One of the silliest comes from that John L. Locke character, who once suggested that women naturally evolved to converse more horizontally, like giraffes evolved to have long necks. His argument is that women’s affinities for talking about people behind their backs and babbling over one another in conversation are a product of our ancestors’ confinement to domestic spaces — the kitchen, the crafts table — where women were ingrained to develop feelings of closeness through intimate admissions about themselves and other people. So in the kitchens and at the crafts table they shall stay. Locke also argued that men’s competitive speech style arose because they were “selected to aggress and dominate, but could end up killing themselves, [so] they needed a safer way of achieving their goals.” Thus, men opted for ritualized verbal duels involving words instead of weapons. These confrontations always produced a winner and a loser, and long after dueling traditions ended, men still continue to talk this way. Or so Locke’s story goes.”
“Today’s sharpest linguists, however, have data suggesting that “teenage girl speak,” one of the most loathed and mocked language styles, is actually what standard English is going to sound like in the near future. In a lot of ways, it’s already happening. And that’s making a lot of middle-age men very, very cranky.”
“”We can find speakers today in their seventies, eighties, and nineties around little villages in the United Kingdom, for example,” D’Arcy says with a smile, “who use like in many of the same ways that young girls today are using it.”
“People have looked down upon the way women use language for centuries, and like Otto Jespersen and Bob Garfield, they often write off women’s communication styles as stupid and annoying. But observers of gender and foreign language have noticed that when there truly is a significant difference between how men and women talk, it’s often because women were literally forbidden from using certain words, sounds, or writing systems and were thus forced to innovate. For instance, in some of southern Africa’s Bantu languages, there is a strict rule that forbids married women from saying the name of their father-in-law, or any word that sounds similar or has the same root. Bantu women often work their way around this rule by borrowing synonyms from other local languages. Some linguists think that is actually how click consonants made their way into Bantu — women borrowed them from the Khoisan languages of West Africa, and eventually they made their way into the mainstream Bantu spoken by everyone. A similar story comes from China, where the Chinese writing style Nüshu is often referred to as a “women’s language” and regarded as completely separate from standard Chinese script. In reality, though, Nüshu is simply a different, more phonetic way of writing standard Chinese, which women developed at a time when they weren’t allowed to learn to read and write.”
“What’s considered ‘good grammar’ today might have been totally unacceptable 50 years ago, or vice versa. Recall the word ain’t, which was once associated with high-class Brits — Winston Churchill was a fan — and has simply devolved since the early 20th century to become one of the kept stigmatized grammatical forms in English history.”
Language and Inequality
“Why do some languages have grammatical gender in the first place? To answer that, let’s rewind about a thousand years to a time when gender was only used to classify words, not people. The English word gender originally comes from the Latin genus, which means “kind” or “type,” and in the beginning it was never applied to human beings. For centuries, masculine and feminine noun classes might as well just have been called “Thing 1” and “Thing 2” — they were seen as nothing but an effective way of structuring a language, and basically no one associated them with human sex. Way more languages had grammatical gender back then too, including English. Indeed, back in the days of Old English, we divided our nouns into masculine, feminine, and neutral classes, a structure that still exists in many Indo-European languages today, like German, Greek, and Russian. It wasn’t until that crazy William the Conqueror busted onto the English-speaking scene in 1066, bringing Old Norman French with him, that our three-way gender distinction died out, as did most of the suffixes distinguishing gender assignments. Eventually, English speakers decided that we didn’t really need grammatical gender anymore, and we settled on the two-way “natural” gender system we have today.”
“Hungarian, Finnish, Korean, Swahili, and Turkish are just a few of the world languages that lack gendered pronouns like he and she entirely. How do you know who someone is talking about without naming their gender? Often it’s just a matter of context, but some languages boast other creative gender-neutral solutions. The indigenous Algonquian languages of North America have two gender-nonspecific third-singular pronouns: Who gets which is determined by which person is more central to the conversation at hand. In these languages, your pronouns change depending on the topic you’re discussing.”
“Pronouns aside, there are also some languages that are essentially gender-free, containing very few words that make reference to a person’s “natural” gender at all. Yoruba, a language spoken in Nigeria, has neither gendered pronouns nor the dozens of gendered nouns we have in English, including son, daughter, host, hostess, hero, heroine, etc. Instead, the most important distinction in Yoruba is the age of the person you’re talking about. So, instead of saying brother and sister, you would say older sibling and younger sibling, or egbun and aburo. The only Yoruba words that make reference to a person’s gender (or sex, as it were) are obirin and okorin, meaning “one who has a vagina” and “one who has a penis.” So if you really wanted to call someone your sister, you would have to say egbon mi obirin, or “my older sibling, the one with the vagina.” When you get that specific, it makes our English obsession with immediately identifying people’s sexes seem just plain creepy.”
“In Italian, the masculine noun segretario refers to the prestigious position of a political secretary, like a secretary of state (a role traditionally held by men), while the feminine noun segretaria refers to a low-paid receptionist (a role traditionally held by women. Today, if a woman starts out as a segretaria in a government office and moves her way up to become a secretary to a politician, she would have to change the suffix of her title to a masculine one. For her, moving up professionally would literally mean having to masculinize her own title.”
“One very untheoretical example of this comes from the Dyirbal language spoken in Aboriginal Australia. Dyirbal has four noun classes: the first is masculine, the second is feminine, the third is specifically for edible fruits and vegetables, and the fourth is for anything that doesn’t fall into the first three. That might sound straightforward enough, but here’s where it gets weird: an animal will always be assigned masculine gender in Dyirbal, unless it is notably more harmful or dangerous than the others in its category — in that case, it gets moved to the feminine class. For instance, while fish belong to the masculine category in Dyirbal, dangerous fish, like stonefish and garfish, are marked as feminine. So are all other potentially deadly creatures, as well as anything having to do with fire, water, or fighting. “The rationale for this categorization tells us something about how Dyirbal people conceive of their world and interact with it,” Romaine says.
The Dyirbal system also serves as another example of treating masculine gender as the default. Sort of like, everything in the world of this language is male until given a good reason not to be. This default male pattern shows up in the grammar structures of hundreds of languages — in ways as understated as the French rule that only female nouns are marked with an e, or the fact that in Italian, a group of both male and female kids would automatically be called a group of “boys” (only when referring to a group of all girls would you use the feminine noun). Meanwhile, default maleness can be as overt as the Dizi language of Ethiopia, where almost every noun is classified as masculine, except for things singled out for being “naturally” female (girl, woman, cow), as well as things that are small in size (small broom, small pot). Ultimately, language can serve as a rather blatant means of otherizing all things feminine.
In Dyirbal’s system, a noun is considered masculine unless it could literally kill you.”
“In practice, what these metaphors of women as nature, territories, and technologies do is place feminine gender in that same distant category of “other.” According to Romaine, by comparing her to things like storms and seas, “woman is symbolic of the conflict between nature and civilization, tempting men with her beauty, attracting men with her charms, but dangerous and therefore in need of conquest.” Woman is a continent to colonize, a fortress to siege.”
“Using a plural pronoun for a singular meaning is nothing new for English speakers. A few hundred years ago, the second-person you was exclusively a plural; thou was the singular version (e.g., “Thou shalt not kill,” “Thou shalt not lie”). Eventually, you extended to the singular meaning and pushed out thou entirely. Who’s to say the same thing couldn’t happen with they?”
“No one can force anyone to say anything in this country — political correctness does not endanger our freedom of expression at all. The only thing it actually threatens is the notion that we can separate our word choices from our politics — that how we choose to communicate doesn’t say something deeper about who we are. As American English speakers, we are perfectly at liberty to use whatever language we want; we just have to know that our words reveal our social and moral beliefs to some extent. So if one were to use the term comedienne instead of comic or the pronoun she to describe a Ferrari, they could be opening themselves up to criticism, not for flat-out sexism but definitely for expressing an indifference to gender inequality. What rubs people the wrong way about political correctness is not that they can’t use certain words anymore, it’s that political neutrality is no longer an option.”
“I’d like to take a moment to offer a brief linguistic critique of what’s wrong with teaching women to say’ “no” and men to listen for “no” when we talk about sexual consent: analyses of real-life refusals show that there is a precise formula English speakers follow to decline things in a socially acceptable way, and it actually almost never includes the word no. Instead, it goes: hesitate + hedge + express regret + give a culturally acceptable reason. As in “Um, well, I’d love to, but I have to finish this assignment,” or “Oh, I’m sorry, but I should go home and feed my cat.” It is also our very job as listeners to make inferences about what other people mean when they speak, whether or not it is said in the clearest way. (Think of how strange it would be to reject a friend’s invitation out to coffee with a blunt “NO!”) Not to mention that in a sexual assault scenario, refusing something so brusquely might cause more tension or danger. The problem with teaching “no means no” is that it ultimately lets sexual offenders off the hook, because it removes their duty to use common sense as listeners, so that later they can say, “Well, she didn’t say ‘no.’ I can’t read people’s minds,” and we as a culture go, “That’s true, her fault.” Plus, as we’ve already learned, sexual trespassers actually don’t need an explicit no — they already get what they’re doing is wrong. They simply don’t care, because our culture teaches them that they don’t have to.”
“Because research shows that when sexual harassers are asked to switch places with their targets, they are able to grasp quite quickly that what they’ve done is wrong. It’s not that their intentions have been misunderstood — these dudes realize the harm they’ve caused. It’s simply that they aren’t motivated to care. They lack empathy. And this, underneath it all, has to do with a problem of how our culture teaches men to be men.
Our standards of masculinity are extreme and undue: they require that men be powerful, exhaustingly heterosexual, and utterly unrelated to femininity at all costs. In order to perform and protect that masculine identity, men quickly learn that in many cases, they must mask a woman’s viewpoint and disregard her pain. As Beth A. Quinn wrote in 2002, “Men fail to exhibit empathy with women because masculinity precludes them from taking the position of the feminine other, and men’s moral stance vis-à-vis women is attenuated by this lack of empathy.””
“A 1997 study of gender and cursing revealed that listeners associated sailor-mouth women not only with lower socioeconomic status but with lower moral standing. The implication was that a woman partial to dropping the f-bomb would be more likely to, say, litter or cheat on her spouse than one who wasn’t. (This result was not found in participants’ judgments of men who cursed.)”
“A 1991 study of sexual harassment in an underground coal mine determined that one of the biggest obstacles to women miners’ professional advancement was that their male colleagues ousted them from social interaction on the basis that they were too sensitive to swear. Paradoxically, the study also found that if these women started swearing, it didn’t earn them the same social status as their male colleagues; instead, it actually heightened their femininity by way of juxtaposition. In other words, by adopting this one “masculine” trait (vulgarity), their visibility as women increased in comparison, like Charlie’s Angels with their long hair, skintight outfits, and nine-millimeter pistols. Ever met a guy who thought a feminine-presenting woman who could shoot a gun or smoke a cigar was hot? Same idea: the study found that male coal miners actually interpreted the female miners’ swearing as an invitation, and women who cursed were sexually harassed significantly more than women who didn’t. Those who opted out of swearing entirely didn’t have it much better, though; they were excluded from conversation, participation, and ultimately power. As one female miner told the researchers, “Filthy language is like an invisible line between men and women.” The women miners ultimately found themselves between a rock and a hard place — to swear or not to swear. Either way, they couldn’t win.”
Queer Language
“Phoneticians (people who specialize in the study of speech sounds) have been able to describe the sound variations comprising this “gay voice”: they include clearer, longer vowels; prolonged s and z sounds; a nasal vocal quality; and an over-articulation of t’s, p’s, and k’s (this is when you release a little puff of air after a consonant-final word, like cat or thick, almost so it sounds like “cat-uh” or “thick-uh”). Scholars have also noticed that upspeak and a swoopy, musical inflection are features of this so-called gay male voice.”
“In 1997 Stanford University phonologist Arnold Zwicky proposed that the “nonexistence” of a lesbian speech style might be perceived because gay men who use the proverbial “voice” are, whether they realize it or not, signaling a desire to remove themselves from normative, heterosexual masculinity. Lesbians, on the other hand, more often identify closely with their gender group, not against it, so they don’t share the same need to differentiate themselves from straight women. By Zwicky’s thinking, lesbians are women first, gay women second, whereas gay men go the other way around.”
“For decades, language scholars have documented the vivid slang vocabularies of gay men in various communities around the world. In the Philippines, many gay men use a lexicon called swardspeak, which combines imaginative wordplay, pop culture references, malapropisms (word misusages), and onomatopoeia (words that sound like what they mean, like clink and swoosh). For example, in swardspeak, Muriah Carrey means “cheap” and is derived from the Tagalog word mura, which means the same thing, combined with the name of gay pop icon Mariah Carey. There’s also taroosh, a take on the Tagalog taray, which means “bitchy.” (Adding an oosh suffix to a word to make it cuter is a classic characteristic of swardspeak.)”
“I try to keep a straight face as Leap tells me about another popular metaphor once used by gay men to pinpoint others — “I adore seafood, but I can’t stand fish” — which can be found in documents as old as the 1940s.”
“Another robust gay vocabulary comes from British English: it’s called Polari. During the early to mid-twentieth century, many gay men in Britain were fluent in this form of cant slang (that’s a lexicon created explicitly to deceive or confuse outsiders). Used as early as the 1500s, Polari — an iteration of the Italian verb parlare, meaning “to speak”. was an eclectic mix of London slang, words pronounced backward, and broken Romani, Yiddish, and Italian. The vocabulary contained several hundred words, and if you knew what to listen for, you could hear them among everyone from actors and circus performers to wrestlers and navy sailors to members of various gay subcultures. But to everyone else, it sounded like gobbledy-gook. That was the whole idea.
Polari culture is really only remembered by those who were there during its peak in the 1950s and ’60s. I was able to find a couple YouTube clips of its speakers; in one, a seventy-six-year-old former drag performer named Stan Murano lists his best-loved terms from back in the day: “If we saw a nice looking man, we’d say “bona ro me, dear…Your fingers were your martinis; your bum, they called that your brandygage…your ogles were your eyes, hair was your riah…your shoes were your bats.” He smiles as he reminisces.
Polari became less of a secret in the mid-1960s due to a popular BBC radio show that featured a couple of Polari-speaking characters (don’t you just hate it when mainstream media ruins your favorite underground cant slang?). And after homosexuality was decriminalized in Britain in 1967, gay liberationist activists, who saw the lingo as politically regressive, discouraged people from using it. Still, several Polari words can be found in modern British (and sometimes American) slang, including bear (a large, hairy gay man), twink (a young gay man with no body hair), bumming (anal sex), cottaging (cruising for sex in public bathrooms), camp (effeminate), trade (sexual partner), and fantabulous (self-explanatory).”
