Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

by Amanda Montell

Or maybe, if you’re a literal sort, it makes you think of a female dog.

It’s that old mythology that sticks and stones may break your bones but words can never hurt you. “Getting people to understand that language itself is a means through which people can be harmed, elevated, or valued is really important,” Zimman says.

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.)

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

If you want to insult a woman, call her a prostitute. If you want to insult a man, call him a woman.

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.

It 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.

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).

women still believe they should change with marriage, either unaware or in denial of the fact that this signifies a transfer of ownership from their dads to their husbands).

Simply put, slurs go out of style at the same time the underlying belief in them does.

treating dictionary definitions as fixed, unbiased facts is a mistake. Word meanings and cultural beliefs go hand in hand, and they are both changing all the time.

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

No one ever posed a semantic distinction between sex and gender until the 1960s, when folks began to realize that our bodies and social behaviors might not be intrinsically linked.

it’s important to understand that these labels aren’t surfacing just because it’s suddenly trendy to have an identity that will perplex and/or piss off all our great-aunts and -uncles at Thanksgiving.*

It’s a form of taxonomy: we create these labels to help make sense of the world around us and ourselves.

while men’s speech style can be categorized as “competitive,” women’s is “cooperative.”

is the fact that gossip is a serviceable and goal-driven practice.

1) to circulate personal information in order to keep members of a social group in the know; 2) to bond with one another by establishing the gossipers as an in-group; and 3) to affirm

the group’s commitment to certain values or norms.

“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.”

“It’s generally pretty well known that if you identify a sound change in progress, then young people will be leading old people, and women tend to be maybe half a generation ahead of males,”

in French, if you wanted to say something like, “The doctor is brave,” but the doctor is a woman and you want to indicate that, you’re out of luck. Grammatically speaking, the noun le docteur, meaning doctor, and the adjective courageux, meaning brave, would both have to be masculine. French feminists have tried to come up with alternatives—la docteur, la docteure, la doctoresse—but in France, there is a real-life grammar police, an official language council called the Académie française, which is reluctant to recognize such words or add them to the dictionary. (At the time I’m writing this only four of the current thirty-six members of the Académie are women. Yet somehow, six of the members are men named “Jean.”)

In grammar as in allegory as in life, women are considered reckless places outside the civilized male world—wild things meant to be tamed into the weak, delicate flowers we’ve traditionally wanted women to be.

A: As a straight male how would u feel about yr child having a homosexual school teacher?! Who their around for 8hrs of the day? B: If a gay teacher teaches my child the difference between they’re, their and there, I’m good.

“I think the golden rule for men should be: If you’re a man, don’t say anything to a woman on the street that you wouldn’t want a man saying to you in prison.”

He established a no-interruption rule in the writer’s room, so that no one was allowed to cut off anyone of any gender before they were done speaking. As it turned out, the new strategy worked, the women’s ideas became heard, and it made the whole team more productive and creative.