Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

by Amanda Montell

Meet Sociolinguistics What All the Cool Feminists Are Talking About

told you that without even realizing it, language is impacting all of our lives in an astonishing, filthy, and fascinating way?

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

patriarchy: a societal structure in which men are the central figures. Human societies haven’t always been patriarchal—scholars believe man’s rule began somewhere around 4000 BCE. (Homo sapiens have been around for two hundred thousand years in all, for context.) When people talk about “smashing the patriarchy,” they’re talking about challenging this oppressive system,

Every day, people are becoming freer than ever to express gender identities and sexualities of all stripes, and simultaneously, the language we use to describe ourselves evolves. This is interesting and important, but for some, it can be hard to keep up, which can make an otherwise well-meaning person confused and defensive.

circulating criticisms of women’s voices—like that they speak with too much vocal fry, overuse the words like and literally, and apologize in excess.

They brand judgments like these as pseudofeminist advice aimed at helping women talk with “more authority” so that they can be “taken more seriously.”

keeping women in a state of self-questioning—keeping them quiet—for no objectively logical reason other than that they don’...

More troubling still, there are also plenty of folks—usually ones of some social privilege—who want to stop lang...

language as ungrammatical, refusing to learn the difference between sex and gender, or lamenting the inability to throw around the word slut willy-nilly without being called sexist, like they could in the good old days. Sensing the grounds of linguistic change quaking beneath them, these humans take phenomena like vocal fry and gender-free pronouns as a spine-chilling omen that their dominance in the world is at stake.

dig their heels in, hoping that if they can keep English as they know it from changing—a futile effort, as any linguist will tell you—the social hierarchies that they so benefit from

fifth century AD, a trio of Germanic tribes from Scandinavia called the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes show up at the British Isles unannounced. (Maybe they arrive nicely, maybe they arrive violently; historians aren’t totally sure—but judging by their sharp metal accessories, I’m willing to wager a guess.) These tribes speak a language called Englisc, which kind of sounds like a troll language from Lord of the Rings, with lots of rolled r’s, dark vowels, and throaty, phlegmy consonants. This lingo, along with the north Germanic languages spoken by Vikings (who came a few centuries later), pushes Britain’s Celtic languages to the outskirts of the country. The little bit of Celtic that’s left behind combines with these other guys’ languages to eventually

become what we know as Old English (totally incomprehensible today, unless you’re an Old English scholar, in which case, hello and welcome, fellow nerd).

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 li...

black death sweeps through and kills off about a third of the population. This makes the working class way more im...

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 (which you’ve probably s...

English dictionary is published in 1604 (it contains only 2,449 words; for perspective, Webster’s Third New International Unabridged Dictionary, addendum included, boasts a whopping 470,000).

may or may not have noticed, but most of the main characters in this story are men: the army dudes, the aristocracy, the

The link between language and culture is inextricable: language has always been, and continues to be, used to reflect and reinforce power structures and social norms.

Deborah Cameron, a feminist linguist at Oxford University and personal hero of mine, about how exactly the English language got so sexist—is it inherently that way?

good news—the English language is not innately biased against women and nonbinary genders; but the bad news is that its speakers have collectively consented to wield it in a way that reinforces existing gender biases, often in ways they’re not even conscious of.

first we can consider the idea that, in a sense, man and person are oftentimes synonymous in English.

hearers of that story will most often understand this unmarked ‘person’ to be a . . . middle-class white man until further specified,”

Scott Kiesling, a scholar of language and masculinity at the University of Pittsburgh. “Men are still very often the invisible standard against which a group’s language is compared.”

esteemed professions—surgeons,* scientists, lawyers, writers, actors (even nonhuman actors*)—are perceive...

preconceptions are reflected when we say things like female doctor or woman scientist, implying that such positions are inherently male, while models...

Something analogous happens with the trend of inserting the word man before what we consider “girl” wo...

mompreneur, SHE-EO, and girlboss illuminate the notion that entrepreneur and CEO are not actually gender-neutral terms but are tacitly coded as male. They suggest that when a woman endeavors in business, we can’t help but to cutesy-fy her title. Mompreneur may read as a sparkling emblem of girl power, and it

Even positive gendered language shapes how we see ourselves: just think of the exceptionally gendered compliments we receive as young children. “Praise for little boys is more likely to include words like smart and clever,” Cameron says, “while for little girls it’s more about pretty, cute.”

This is because for the first time in history we have both the concrete linguistic data and the emotional momentum to inspire tangible differences in how we talk about gender and how we perceive the speech of men, women, and everyone in between.

Compared to the centuries-old studies of physics or geology, the study of language and gender is brand-spanking new: before the 1970s, there was simply no canon of

empirical data on the subject. The dawn of this field of study coincided with the second-wave feminist movement, when there was a larger political need t...

But by the late 1980s and early ’90s, mainstream culture’s urgency about feminism had dimmed, along with much of the research. (Although, there were luckily still many scholars of color making strides in feminist theory even though it wasn’t academically in vogue anymore, like Kimberlé Crenshaw, who came up with the concept of intersectionality* in 1989.) Overall, progress was stymied.

Like, is it sexual harassment for a male lawyer to call his female colleague sweetie in the courtroom?

One of the most exciting concepts this new crop of research shows is that women possess a secret, badass arsenal of linguistic qualities that are profoundly misunderstood and deeply needed in the world right now.

(Among these clever tendencies are the proclivities to adapt more quickly to linguistic change and to ask certain types of solidarity-forming questions.)

depending on whether you used the word recalcitrant, with its daring surplus of syllables and dynamic pairing of hard and soft c’s, versus stubborn, which always called to mind the image of some fool stubbing a toe on his own obstinacy). My parents got me a thesaurus for my tenth birthday, and it continues to be my all-time favorite gift.

Sex, Gender, and Language.

spoke too loudly and said like too much—not to mention their distaste for my premature fondness of four-letter words.

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

It became clear: language is the next frontier of modern gender equality. We just have to help the world see it. In the coming chapters, we’re going

vocal fry

We’re going to talk about how speaking in a more gender-inclusive way is a very cool idea while being a grammar snob is not, and why the “gay voice” is a thing while the “lesbian voice” seemingly isn’t.

contraction y’all to address them: “So how did y’all’s French test go?” I asked. The tweed-clad mother did not approve. “Y’all?” she gasped, taking a palm to her sternum. “You can’t go around saying the word y’all, Amanda. It’s terrible English! People will think you’re stupid . . . or worse, Southern!”

“I like to see y’all as an efficient and socially conscious way to handle the English language’s lack of a second-person plural pronoun.”

“I could have used the word you to address the two girls, but I wanted to make sure your daughter knew I was including her in the conversation.

“Exactly!” I carried on, delighted to have been given an inch. “There are other interesting alternatives: I could have said yinz, which is standard in Western Pennsylvania and parts of Appalachia, but I personally don’t think it rolls off the tongue quite as nicely. All things considered, I simply find y’all to be the most fluent solution to a tricky lexical gap.

ain’t, which, by the way, was actually used abundantly among the English upper crust in the nineteenth century.”

buddy and sissy were abbreviations of the words brother and sister.

foppish man. Today, dude is one of the most beloved words in the English language.