Wordslut

by Amanda Montell

  People have looked down upon the way women use language for centuries, and like Otto Jespersen and Bob Garfield, they often write off women’s communication styles as stupid and annoying. But observers of gender and foreign language have noticed that when there truly is a significant difference between how men and women talk, it’s often because women were literally forbidden from using certain words, sounds, or writing systems and were thus forced to innovate. For instance, in some of southern Africa’s Bantu languages, there is a strict rule that forbids married women from saying the name of their father-in-law, or any word that sounds similar or has the same root. Bantu women often work their way around this rule by borrowing synonyms from other local languages. Some linguists think that is actually how click consonants made their way into Bantu—women borrowed them from the Khoisan languages of West Africa, and eventually they made their way into the mainstream Bantu spoken by everyone. A similar story comes from China, where the Chinese writing style Nüshu is often referred to as a “women’s language” and regarded as completely separate from standard Chinese script. In reality, though, Nüshu is simply a different, more phonetic way of writing standard Chinese, which women developed at a time when they weren’t allowed to learn to read and write.

  Both of these examples are what Deborah Cameron calls “a tribute to women’s ingenuity but also a product of their historically subordinate status.” For women, language is often a complex way of coping with, or all-out resisting, oppression.

  In situations like Nüshu, the German-speaking Hungarians, and the Catalan-speaking Spaniards, it’s clear why young women innovate linguistically—it’s their ticket out. As for why they are responsible for things like vocal fry? A foolproof conclusion has yet to be drawn. However, Vasvári muses that this might be linked to the idea that language can also serve as a form of symbolic agency. Women aren’t the only people who use language this way. “Compare how so much of slang and other new usages had their origin in black English,” Vasvári offers, referencing popular terms like phat and fuckboy, which have been swiped, however unwittingly, from AAVE. “You can wonder why it is that the language of a powerless group gets taken up later by the majority—but perhaps it has always been the powerless who use language as a form of power. Think of disenfranchised Jews in Europe, who gave origin to ‘the Jewish joke’ and, in fact, to much of humor altogether.”

  The ways in which women and many other socially oppressed folks empower themselves with language are all rather connected. There exists a long history of marginalized groups innovating linguistically to build themselves up. And they’re clearly very good at it, because the rest of the world invariably ends up talking just like them, whether they know whom to credit for all their cool new slang terms, word pronunciations, and intonations or not.

  There is another reason why society loves crapping on uptalk, like, and other feminine speech qualities, even though it winds up adopting them: simply put, people get freaked out when things change beyond their control. See, when NORMs like Bob Garfield start hearing vocal fry at the ends of young women’s sentences, they have a mini existential crisis. “[They] become critical and maybe even disturbed and say, ‘That’s not how the language is supposed to sound!’” says Auburn Barron-Lutzross, a linguist at UC Berkeley. Because these guys are used to being in charge, when someone else starts making things happen, they feel like the end of the world is nigh. “Had NORMs been the ones to pioneer vocal fry, uptalk, and like, we’d be praising them as enriching expansions of the language. We’d be reading The, Like, New Yorker,” journalist Gabriel Arana told the Atlantic. But they didn’t—and since America tends to listen to old white dudes, it takes a little while for all of us to catch on.

  There is a simple way we can be part of the shift toward a less judgmental linguistic future: instead of acting crotchety and pedantic toward new language trends, we can feel curious and fascinated by them. Whenever we get the urge to criticize women or anyone else (even our own selves) for a certain dialect feature, we can remember to think like a linguist, reminding ourselves that systematic speech patterns are almost never mindless or stupid. Believing that they are only reinforces a screwed-up linguistic standard.

  Think about the act of policing women’s voices—their intonation, their syntax, their word choice—in the same way we think about policing women’s appearance. Just how women’s magazine articles and commercials tell them they need to be prettier, they also tell them they need to talk differently. I’ve heard the satirical argument that women were given purses to hold and high heels to wear to physically slow them down. While I don’t take this sentiment literally, I think you can compare it to the critique of women’s voices, which are there to steal the focus away from the content of their statements, while distracting women with the anxiety of how their speech sounds to other people. Fretting over the amount of creak in your voice or number of times you apologize are the linguistic equivalents of worrying if your forehead is shiny or if you’re spilling out of your Spanx.

  And gently advising women to stop using discourse markers and vocal fry so they can sound more “articulate”—no matter how well intentioned—is not helpful either. In 2016 I was offered a promo code to test out a new voice-recognition app designed to help young people practice talking without filler phrases like you know and like, so they could sound more “authoritative.” But dressing up this advice as empowering is as shady as telling a woman that wearing a longer hemline will make her worthier of success. It’s a way of punishing women for their own oppression. One of our culture’s least helpful pieces of advice is that women need to change the way they speak to sound less “like women” (or that queer people need to sound straighter, or that people of color need to sound whiter). 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.” It accepts the idea that “feminine” speech is the problem, rather than the sexist attitudes toward it. “The business of feminism is surely to challenge sexist attitudes,” Cameron continues, “to work against prejudice, not around it.”

  So, if someone ever tries to make you—or anyone else—feel stupid for pushing your vocal folds together at the ends of sentences, saying sorry a lot, or another language feature they’ve decided they don’t like, remember: even if the NORMs don’t get you, linguists will. After all, deep down, the haters are probably just bitter that you’re changing the world in ways they can’t control or understand.

  I know that sounds kind of dramatic. But, like, it’s important?

  5

  How to Embarrass the Shit Out of People Who Try to Correct Your Grammar

  Everyone I’ve ever known has at least one grammar pet peeve. A 2013 BuzzFeed listicle titled “17 Misused and Made-Up Words That Make You Rage” features common blunders such as “irregardless,” “supposably,” and the phrase “I could care less,” each paired with a gif of someone tearing their hair out or screaming into the sky. My twenty-five-year-old brother recently told me that one of his greatest pet peeves is when people respond to the question of “How are you?” with “I’m well,” instead of “I’m good.”

  “It just sounds so stupid.” He chuckled.

  I’m not proud to say that I too reflexively cringe whenever I hear this common grammar infraction. But I try not to blame the speaker. “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. Saying “you and I” where “me and you” should go (as in, “Let’s keep this between you and I”) is another example, as is dropping an erroneous “whom” in place of “who,” like in the sentence, “Whomever drank my Diet C
oke needs to replace it by tomorrow, or else.”*

  Everyone loves that “gotcha” feeling that comes with catching someone in a grammar violation, especially when you know the speaker was trying to sound smart to begin with. The thing about hypercorrection, though, is that the intentions are usually noble. Linguists have found that hypercorrection is most common among lower-middle-class women, who see the adverb well, for instance, as a marker of higher social class (you’d be more likely to hear a Goldman Sachs exec say “He knows the market well,” not “He knows the market good”). As we learned from the last chapter, acquiring more prestigious language skills is a powerful tool for women of less socioeconomic privilege. To manifest their aspirations of upward mobility, they attempt to adopt the higher-class grammatical form, but they overshoot the target. The misused wells and whoms were intended to hoist the speaker up the socioeconomic ladder—to gain her respect. It just doesn’t always work out that way.

  “Well, now I feel bad, when you put it like that,” my brother said after I explained all this.

  “Just something to think about,” I told him.

  My brother’s instinct to judge people by their adverb misusage is hardly uncommon. In fact, condemning others’ grammar is one of the most universally accepted snobberies in Western culture. “When the subject is language, you can take pride in being a snob,” Deborah Cameron once said. “You can even display your exquisite sensitivity by comparing yourself to a genocidal fascist (‘I’m a bit of a grammar Nazi: I can’t bear it when people use language incorrectly’).”

  There is at least one type of person you are guaranteed never to find correcting a person’s grammar, however: a linguist. That sounds counterintuitive, but language scientists aren’t interested in how language should work; they’re interested in how it does work. (Policing one’s grammar in public is what Deborah Cameron calls “a shitty thing to do.”) 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. Recall the word ain’t, which was once associated with high-class Brits—Winston Churchill was a fan—and has simply devolved since the early twentieth century to become one of the most stigmatized grammatical forms in English history.

  Sociologically speaking, there are certain grammatical rules across the world’s many languages that carry a load of baggage way heavier than any grammar guide. Some of the most common grammar constructions that speakers use every day and take for granted—nouns, adjectives, suffixes, etc.—are secretly informing their conscious thoughts about human gender. So the next time your coworker, your sibling, or some jerk on Twitter tries to ridicule your adverb usage, you’re going to want to have this information at the ready.

  In about a quarter of the world’s languages, gender and gender stereotypes are fundamentally built into the grammar system. You’re probably familiar with a language in which every noun gets a gender assignment—English isn’t one of them, but French, Spanish, and tons of others are. In these languages, every noun belongs to a masculine or feminine “noun class,” which might affect the prefix or suffix of the word. (There are also languages that have a “neuter” noun class, and some languages have as many as twenty other categories, based on qualities like animate vs. inanimate, edible vs. nonedible, and rational vs. irrational, which we’ll get into shortly.) A noun’s gender assignment extends to other modifiers in the sentence, like adjectives and past-tense verbs, whose genders have to “agree” with the noun.

  In the French sentence Le diner est sur la table verte, which means “dinner is on the green table,” the word for dinner is masculine, but table is feminine, as is green, the adjective describing the table. In the Spanish sentence El nuevo jefe necesita una recepcionista, meaning, “The new boss needs a receptionist,” the noun boss is masculine, as is the adjective new, which describes the boss, while the word for receptionist is feminine. (And if the gender assignments in that Spanish example seem sketchy to you, you’re onto something.)

  This system of noun classification is called “grammatical gender.”

  We don’t assign gender to nouns in English—except, that is, when we use the pronoun she to refer to natural disasters, countries, and cars (all of which, by no coincidence, are dangerous things that men feel the need to vanquish and control; more on that in a bit). We do, however, have a system called “natural gender,” which means that the only gendered nouns in our language (man, woman, brother, sister, king, queen, actor, actress, etc.) ostensibly correspond to the sex of the person we’re talking about, as do our singular third-person pronouns: he and she.*

  People like to think grammatical gender and “natural” gender have nothing to do with each other—just because a noun is classified as masculine in Spanish or French doesn’t mean the literal thing is masculine. In many cases, this is true. Certainly no one thinks that because the Spanish word for eye (ojo) is masculine and the word for chin (barbilla) is feminine, Spanish speakers perceive eyes as inherently macho body parts and chins as inherently ladylike ones.

  But toward the end of the twentieth century, linguist Suzanne Romaine determined that this relationship between grammatical and “natural” gender is not always so separate. In 1997 Romaine published a seminal* paper called “Gender, Grammar, and the Space in Between.” The same year of Princess Diana’s death and Mike Tyson’s bite fight, Romaine was blowing minds at the University of Oxford with the theory that in languages all over the world, there is some undeniable “leakage” going on between grammatical gender and how we perceive human gender in real life. Romaine’s main point is that in languages with masculine and feminine noun classifications (from Spanish to Sanskrit), it is highly possible—and sometimes inevitable—for the gender of a word to bleed into speakers’ perceptions of what that word means.

  In a language that assigns masculinity to the word doctor and femininity to the word nurse, its speakers might subconsciously start to think of those professions in a fundamentally gendered way. Grammar, Romaine argues, is a feminist concern, and there’s a reason why suffixes and noun agreement have been at the center of the French feminist movement in a way that they haven’t in the United States. That’s because, in languages with grammatical gender, the sexist implications are out in the open, jumping up and down across every part of speech. In English, however, they’re harder to catch. But in both types of languages, they can be overcome.

  Why do some languages have grammatical gender in the first place? To answer that, let’s rewind about a thousand years to a time when gender was only used to classify words, not people. The English word gender originally comes from the Latin genus, which means “kind” or “type,” and in the beginning it was never applied to human beings. For centuries, masculine and feminine noun classes might as well just have been called “Thing 1” and “Thing 2”—they were seen as nothing but an effective way of structuring a language, and basically no one associated them with human sex. Way more languages had grammatical gender back then too, including English. Indeed, back in the days of Old English, we divided our nouns into masculine, feminine, and neuter classes, a structure that still exists in many Indo-European* languages today, like German, Greek, and Russian. It wasn’t until that crazy William the Conqueror busted onto the English-speaking scene in 1066, bringing Old Norman French with him, that our three-way gender distinction died out, as did most of the suffixes distinguishing gender assignments. Eventually, English speakers decided that we didn’t really need grammatical gender anymore, and we settled on the two-way “natural” gender system we have today.

  It would still be a few hundred years before the word gender extended to describe people. And once it did, sex and gender were used interchangeably—we didn’t have the body versus culture distinctions yet.
Several centuries of overlapping meanings went by, and before you knew it, voilà: the grammatical sense of gender and the human senses got all messy and conflated.

  Today, classifying every noun as masculine or feminine like they do in French and Spanish might seem overly complicated to most English speakers, but our natural gender system looks equally cumbersome to languages that don’t have it. Hungarian, Finnish, Korean, Swahili, and Turkish are just a few of the world languages that lack gendered pronouns like he and she entirely. How do you know who someone is talking about without naming their gender? Often it’s just a matter of context, but some languages boast other creative gender-neutral solutions. The indigenous Algonquian languages of North America have two gender-nonspecific third-singular pronouns: Who gets which is determined by which person is more central to the conversation at hand. In these languages, your pronouns change depending on the topic you’re discussing. This system is called obviation, and I think it’s terribly clever.