Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

by Amanda Montell

before modern English existed, an early version of the word bitch was actually just another word for genitalia—anyone’s genitalia—and that only after a long and colorful evolution did it come to describe a female beast, naturally leading to its current meaning: a bossy, evil, no-fun lady.

there are also plenty of folks—usually ones of some social privilege—who want to stop language from evolving at all costs. These are the grumps you may find dismissing gender-neutral language as ungrammatical, refusing to learn the difference between sex and gender,

the first 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).

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.

70 percent of American 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).

“Woman as sex object” is one of patriarchy’s oldest tropes, mostly due to that thousands-of-years-old attitude that a woman’s personal desire and sexual free will are inherently bad. Even a brief scan of our language’s slang for women will reveal that female desire is worthy of shame no matter what a woman chooses to do with it, which can only be one of two things per our culture’s rules: having a lot of sex, which earns her the reputation of a whore, or opting to withhold it, which gets her labeled a prude.

queer used to be exclusively a homophobic insult but has undergone a pretty impressive reappropriation by academics and the LGBTQ+ community. Queer is still considered problematic by some, but in the grand scheme of things, the word has evolved into a sort of self-affirming umbrella term for nonnormative gender and sexual identities. Today it can be found in contexts as lighthearted as the title of the TV series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and as formal as one of the gender options listed on a job application, next to male and female.

“Perhaps when we call each other ‘ho,’ we acknowledge that we are women who have sex and earn our own money too; and when we call each other ‘bitch,’ we acknowledge the realities of this man-made world and affirm our ability to survive in it. Through resistance comes redefinition.”

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

Jamaican word bumbaclot, meaning “ass wipe,”

If you’ve ever watched the local news, looked up the weather, or used a GPS, you have Dr. Brill to thank.

Yvonne Brill spent decades launching missions to the moon and to Mars. In 2011 President Obama awarded her the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. But damn, that stroganoff. And lest we forget those eight years she took off to nurture her offspring (which didn’t actually happen; she just went part-time). In the eyes of the Times, however, those trappings of traditional femininity not only defined Brill more than her contributions to the cosmos, they were—as the “but” at the start of their second paragraph implies—in direct contradiction. The Times didn’t get away with their sexist aspersion of Brill’s life. They hastily struck the stroganoff reference after a veritable shitstorm of criticism echoed throughout the press, lamenting the obit’s emphasis on Brill’s stereotypical embodiment of womanness