Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

by Amanda Montell

Because we live in a society where, historically, it hasn’t been as easy for women to do cool things, it’s been hard for them to help define the world from a position of power (though, as it turns out, women do have an enormous impact on how language evolves from the bottom up, which is its own kind of power, and we’ll learn all about that very soon).

In my college sociolinguistics classes, I started learning about some of the subtle ways gender stereotypes are hiding in English . . . like how the 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 or enclosure. Can you imagine how different life would be if that’s how we referred to sex? If women were linguistically framed as the protagonists of any given sexual scenario, could that potentially mean that a woman’s orgasm as opposed to a dude’s would be seen as the proverbial climax—the ultimate goal? Questions like that blew my mind.

This blew my mind!

Ten thousand years ago, when Homo sapiens lived nomadic lifestyles, wandering from place to place, men and women all had multiple sexual partners and female sexuality was considered totally normal and great. 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.

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

Analyze a few hundred transcripts of dude-on-dude chatter and you’ll usually find a dominant speaker who holds the floor, and a subordinate waiting for his turn. It’s a vertical structure. But with women, the conversation is frequently much more horizontal and malleable; everyone is an equal player. While men tend to view conversation as an arena for establishing hierarchies and expressing individual achievement, women’s goals are typically to support the other speakers and emphasize solidarity. Thus, women progressively build on what one another says.

Women’s conversations also have a distinctive turn-taking structure—a style of talk that Coates likens to a musical jam session. “The defining characteristic of a . . . jam session,” she says, “is that the conversational floor is potentially open to all participants simultaneously.” In such conversations, you might hear overlapping talk, speakers repeating one another, or rephrasing each other’s words. Everyone is working together to construct meaning, and thus the one-speaker-at-a-time rule does not apply. “Simultaneous speech does not threaten comprehension,” Coates explains, “but on the contrary permits a more multilayered development of topics.”

So when women get together and talk to each other in a horizontal style, you’re basically looking at a bunch of people all navigating those expectations at the same time, doing a damn good job of it, and enjoying the reciprocation. I think it’s safe to say any woman who’s ever experienced the genuine empathy and solidarity of another woman knows it’s a pretty satisfying feeling.

For decades, linguists have agreed that young, urban females tend to be our linguistic innovators.

But the best correlation of them all, to me at least, is this: people with high IQs, the most intelligent folks of the bunch, are more likely than anyone else to curse.