Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

by Amanda Montell

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.”)