Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

by Amanda Montell

“Getting people to understand that language itself is a means through which people can be harmed, elevated, or valued is really important,”

Linguistics is, in fact, the scientific study of how language works in the real world.

pretty much every corner of language is touched by gender, from the most microscopic units of sound to the broadest categories of conversation. And because gender is directly linked to power in so many cultures, necessarily, so is language. It’s just that most of us can’t see it.

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.

Mompreneur may read as a sparkling emblem of girl power, and it certainly makes for a good hashtag, but in practice, terms like that don’t quite work to undo implicit sexism in language—they reinforce it.

approximately 90 percent of all recorded slang words for women were negative, compared to only 46 percent of recorded words for men.

There are two types of semantic change: pejoration is where a word starts out with a neutral or positive meaning and eventually devolves to mean something negative. The opposite is called amelioration.

Linguists have actually determined that the majority of insults for men sprout from references to femininity, either from allusions to women themselves or to stereotypically feminine men: wimp, candy-ass, motherfucker.

wasn’t until human beings 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.

That we have used language to systematically reduce women to edible, nonhuman, and sexual entities for so many years is no coincidence. Instead, it makes a clear statement about the expectations, hopes, and fears of our society as a whole.

For example, if someone of any gender does something conniving, we can call them a “shit-filled, two-faced sneak” or a “goddamn villainous crook,” instead of a bitch or a dick—insults

Perhaps try the Jamaican word bumbaclot, meaning “ass wipe,”

Until the late fifteenth century, gender was only ever used to describe grammatical categories, like masculine and feminine nouns. Never people.

5-ARD

For the Dominican Republic, people with 5-ARD are just “girls” whose bodies and minds suddenly become “boys.”

many doctors simply don’t know how to recognize or treat heart disease in women, whose symptoms usually show up differently than men’s (like nausea and neck discomfort as opposed to chest pain).

anyone who has ever been female, either in birth assignment or identity, is unavoidably still dragooned into following some patriarchal convention of feminine speech.

one observation has remained rather constant: while men’s speech style can be categorized as “competitive,” women’s is “cooperative.”

adopt deferential phrases like just and you know to dilute the conviction of their statements (e.g., “I just feel like maybe we should push the deadline to Friday, you know?”).

softening hedges like just, I mean, and I feel like as signs of uncertainty, but research shows that these words accomplish something different: instead, they’re used to help create trust and empathy in a conversation.

Ann Friedman has written at length about the hate mail she has received for her perceived overuse of hedges on her podcast Call Your Girlfriend, a conversational show she cohosts with her best friend, entrepreneur Aminatou Sow.

“Language is not always about making an argument or conveying information in the cleanest, simplest way possible. It’s often about building relationships. It’s about making yourself understood and trying to understand someone else.”

They’re part of what make a conversation feel productive. All the mm-hmms and yeahs represent Lyn’s investment in the discourse and her support of its content.

African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), a systematic dialect spoken in many black communities,

“The defining characteristic of a . . . jam session,” she says, “is that the conversational floor is potentially open to all participants simultaneously.”

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,

minimal responses like yeah, mm-hmm, and that’s right to affirm the other speakers and push the discussion forward.

This system of noun classification is called “grammatical gender.”

The first is that 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

In July 2014 the Swedish gender-neutral third-singular pronoun hen was added to the official dictionary next to han and hon, meaning he and she. Many people adopted hen into their vocabularies with little complaint.)

Consistently interrupting women as they’re speaking is a similar ploy for control. Much research has shown that women are routinely interrupted more than men,

in 1990, when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was the only woman on the bench, 35.7 percent of overall interruptions were aimed at her (which, out of nine justices, was already a high percentage); twelve years later, after Ruth Bader Ginsburg was added, 45.3 percent were directed at the two female justices; and in 2015, with three women on the bench (Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan), 65.9 percent of all court interruptions on the court were aimed at female justices.

The underlying problem with all of these forms of sexual trespassing is that they rely on the assumption that a man has an automatic right to a woman’s body.

swears are the only types of English words that you can use as an infix. An infix is a grammatical unit of meaning that you insert in the middle of a word,