Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

by Amanda Montell

But what if I told you that eight hundred years ago, the word bitch had nothing to do with women (or canines, for that matter)? What if I told you that 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.

one of our culture’s biggest obstacles is the idea that language doesn’t matter the way that other, more tangible forms of freedom and oppression do.

We’re also living in a time when we find respected media outlets and public figures 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.” What they don’t seem to realize is that they’re actually keeping women in a state of self-questioning—keeping them quiet—for no objectively logical reason other than that they don’t sound like middle-aged white men.

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. Because old white dudes have ruled our culture for so long, and language is the medium through which that culture was created and communicated, the time has come to challenge how and why we use language the way we do, and how we think about it in the first place.

words like 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 certainly makes for a good hashtag, but in practice, terms like that don’t quite work to undo implicit sexism in language—they reinforce it.

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 to understand the hidden sexism in English.

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.)

“Actually,” I offered, sliding back across the seat, “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.”

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

approximately 90 percent of all recorded slang words for women were negative, compared to only 46 percent of recorded words for men.

“Again and again in the history of the language, one finds that a perfectly innocent term designating a girl or a woman may begin with totally neutral or even positive connotations, but that gradually it acquires negative implications, at first perhaps only slightly disparaging, but after a period of time becoming abusive and ending as a sexual slur.”

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).

this can also be applied to one’s legal name (which 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).

the purpose of name-calling is to accuse a person of not behaving as they should in the eyes of the speaker. The end goal of the insult is to shape the recipient’s actions to fit the speaker’s desired image of a particular group. Nasty and bossy criticize women for not behaving as sweet and docile as they ought to—for wanting too much power. Equally, words like wimp and pansy point out a man’s failure to live up to the macho standard of what men are supposed to be.

It’s possible that people still confuse the bodily sense of masculinity and femininity (now understood as sex) and the cultural or identity part of it (gender) because these words have been used interchangeably for half a millennium. 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.

we are all in a constant ongoing process of using language to construct our genders.

We still crave labels. Linguists say that this has everything to do with the power of words to legitimize experiences, as if an idea only becomes valid once it’s christened with a title. “It’s clearly empowering for people to discover that they’re not the only ones having an experience and that the experience can be named,” explains UCSB gender and language scholar Lal Zimman.

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

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.

People confuse women’s use of certain softening hedges like just, I mean, and I feel like as signs of uncertainty, but research shows that these words accomplish something different: instead, they’re used to help create trust and empathy in a conversation.

“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.”

“Women’s avoidance of information-seeking questions seems to be related to their role in constructing a speaker as ‘someone who knows the answer,’ an expert,” Coates explains. “In friendly conversation, women avoid the role of expert and therefore avoid forms which construct asymmetry.”

one of the most defining characteristics of men’s conversations, one that helps maintain its hierarchical structure, is that they tend to happen in alternating monologues, or stretches of talk where one speaker holds the floor for a lengthy period of time without any interruptions, not even in the form of minimal responses.

when they were little, boys’ friendships with other boys were just as intimate and emotional as friendships between girls; it wasn’t until the norms of masculinity sank in that the boys ceased to confide in or express vulnerable feelings for one another. By the age of eighteen, society’s “no homo” creed had become so entrenched that they felt like the only people they could look to for emotional support were women, further perpetuating the notion that women are obligated by design to carry humanity’s emotional cargo.

“It is undeniable,” says Coates, “that one of the burdens of being born female is the imperative to be nice.”

Scholars have a clever word for this kind of social structure in which power is formed through a brotherhood that objectifies and dehumanizes those on the outside: they call it fratriarchy. Many think this is a more accurate way to describe our culture’s post-feudal system, which is ruled not by the fathers, but by peer networks of the brothers.

Today’s sharpest linguists, however, have data suggesting that “teenage girl speak,” one of the most loathed and mocked language styles, is actually what standard English is going to sound like in the near future. In a lot of ways, it’s already happening. And that’s making a lot of middle-age men very, very cranky.

Young women use the linguistic features that they do, not as mindless affectations, but as power tools for establishing and strengthening relationships. Vocal fry, uptalk, and even like, are in fact not signs of ditziness, but instead all have a unique history and specific social utility. And women are not the only people who use them.

People don’t seem to care or even notice when men talk this way. Only when it comes from female mouths does it cause such an upset. This fact makes it clear that our culture’s aversion to vocal fry, uptalk, and like isn’t really about the speech qualities themselves. Instead, it’s about the fact that, in modern usage, women were the first to use them.

The way any of these folks talk isn’t inherently more or less worthy of respect. It only sounds that way because it reflects an underlying assumption about who holds more power in our culture.

As Deborah Cameron once said, “Teaching young women to accommodate to the linguistic preferences, aka prejudices, of the men who run law firms and engineering companies is doing the patriarchy’s work for it.”

“I’m well” is an example of something called hypercorrection, which refers to the over-application of some perceived grammar rule that results in a sentence that sounds right but technically isn’t.

People tend to think of prescriptive grammar—that’s the grammar your English teacher made you learn—as this almighty, unchanging force that has been there forever, like gravity or the sun. We forget that grammar rules are a human invention, and they’re constantly evolving. What’s considered “good grammar” today might have been totally unacceptable fifty years ago, or vice versa.

Psycholinguistic studies show that in English, excessively “girly” suffixes like -ette and -ess possess actively negative or at least diminutive connotations. After all, -ette did not start out as a feminine suffix, but as a way to refer to something smaller or of lesser value (kitchenette, cigarette).

English speakers have been using they as a singular pronoun to refer to someone whose gender is unknown to them ever since the days of Middle English (“Someone left their goblet in the gatehouse”).

Jane Austen was all about singular they and used it precisely seventy-five times throughout her six novels.

Today, many reputable grammar sources, like the AP Stylebook, formally endorse singular they, as do influential institutions from Facebook to the government of Canada.

twenty years from now, introducing yourself with your name and your pronouns could become the norm. “Hi, my name is Amanda, she/her—you?” “I’m Sam, they/them. Nice to meet you.” Is that really so mind-boggling?

But for those who outright refuse to learn new pronouns, grammar does not work as a defense, because language scholars know that isn’t really the problem.

the reality is that grammar and morality don’t actually have anything to do with one another, and attacking a bigot’s poor grammar does not itself prove you are a better person. It might prove that you had the opportunity to become more educated than they did, or that you spent a lot of time mastering the rules of standard English. However, the moral significance of what someone says is about the content, not the grammar.

The other problem with policing people’s preposition usage or dangling modifiers is that “poor grammar” is often a criticism hurled at what is really just a nonstandard English dialect.

Linguists know that nonstandard forms of a language are not objectively “bad.” The grammatical forms themselves, like saying “he be”* instead of “he is,” are not inherently worse or better than what we learned in English class. They’re simply stigmatized based on how we feel about the type of person using them.

“Language pedantry is snobbery and snobbery is prejudice,”

Whenever language changes, as when anything in life changes, folks can’t help but feel a little fussy. That’s because language change is frequently a sign of bigger social changes, which makes people anxious. It’s why people above the age of forty have always loathed teen slang, no matter the era: it represents a new generation rising up and taking over.

no one can force anyone to say anything in this country—political correctness does not endanger our freedom of expression at all. The only thing it actually threatens is the notion that we can separate our word choices from our politics—that how we choose to communicate doesn’t say something deeper about who we are.

As American English speakers, we are perfectly at liberty to use whatever language we want; we just have to know that our words reveal our social and moral beliefs to some extent.

the act of catcalling isn’t really about sex—it’s about power.

Because men have gotten so used to speaking for everyone, thanks to millennia of doing so, when women begin to creep into their territory, they feel as though they have to do something to reassert the authority they’ve been taught for so long is rightfully theirs. In a way, catcalling, interruption, disregarding a woman by telling her she’s crazy, and other forms of silencing are in response to this gradual challenging of the power scales.

“So the silencing of women, in all its forms, is more than a convenience allowing men to enjoy conversation more,” Lakoff said. “It is the basic tool by which political inequity is created, reinforced, and made to seem inevitable.”