Wordslut

by Amanda Montell

  Using slang to self-identify their own genitalia is a go-to move for trans folks. “A lot of trans people now see a male body as a body belonging to anyone who identifies as a man,” says Zimman. And vice versa for a female body. In some cases, they might even hybridize words to create brand-new ones—boycunt, manpussy, and dicklit are a few Zimman has come across. Using these words is an act of “reclaiming the body parts themselves,” Zimman says. “It’s part of a general reframing of these body parts that are so often a source of discomfort, of dysphoria, of rejection—it’s reframing them as something that is erotic and . . . that doesn’t necessarily have to involve erasing the differences that exist in trans bodies.”

  What we stand to learn here is that evidently, if one decides they don’t feel like vagina, box, snatch, boning, or screwing most accurately or comfortably describe their bodies or sex, they can chuck our current sexicon out the window. They can come up with their own entirely new words. In 2015, I asked a bunch of my cisgender women friends if they could rename their equipment anything they wanted to, what would it be? Their responses ranged from silly to saucy, including terms like galaxy, pooka, freya, V, vashina, and peach. The delightfully comprehensive phrase vaginal-cliteral-vulval complex (or VCVC) is another women-invented term I’ve heard to describe said genitalia.

  I also did a little research online to find out what trans and queer communities call their bodies when they want something gender neutral that’s a little more fun than genitalia. Thanks to Tumblr, I discovered stuff, junk, bits, down there, front hole, funparts, venis, and click.

  I don’t expect the complete dissolution of the words vagina or penis or their problematic slang alternatives. But I’m into the idea of inviting women and genderqueer folks to describe sex and their bodies however they like, regardless of what medical professionals, movies, or porn tell them to say. We could start by using our words of choice just with sexual partners, then move on to using them with our friends in the real world, then bring them to the internet, and eventually, who knows? Maybe, little by little, the intention behind them will sink into the cultural consciousness, until one day, calling a vagina a VCVC and sex sheathing will be just as common as saying snatch and screwing. Maybe the idea of naming your own body on your terms will catch on. And maybe when that happens, a rebalancing of the sexual power scales will finally follow.

  There are a lot of maybes and who knows in that sentiment. As always, predictions when it comes to the relationship between language and social change are notoriously hard to make. Still, it is part of a researcher’s job to make hypotheses. So, to come full circle, I asked the trusted experts I spoke to for this book to give their brutally honest insight about the future of the English language, not only with regard to sex, but to everything: insults, gender and sexuality labels, grammar, catcalling, cursing. Deborah Cameron, Lal Zimman, and a few others have some pretty mind-blowing ideas.

  11

  So . . . In One Thousand Years, Will Women Rule the English Language?

  In 1987 a duo of kooky hardcore feminists named Mary Daly and Jane Caputi published a book called Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language. This radical, lady-powered new dictionary was aimed at transforming English, or what they labeled “patriarchal speech,” into a language for and about women. Daly and Caputi were the kinds of die-hard second-wave feminists who genuinely believed that women were the intellectually and morally superior gender and that a world helmed by them should be our realistic goal. (They were the kinds of feminists that many political right-wingers think are the only kind.)

  Daly and Caputi’s iconoclastic Wickedary redefined and tweaked old English words, and introduced new ones, to create a wacky, witchy new language that ostensibly reflected the world as women saw it. Here are a few notable entries:

  DICK-TIONARY: Any patriarchal dictionary; a derivative, tamed and muted lexicon compiled by dicks.

  HAG: A Witch, Fury, Harpy who haunts the Hedges/Boundaries of patriarchy, frightening fools and summoning Weird Wandering Women to the Wild.

  CRONE-OLOGY: Radical Feminist chronology.

  GYN/ECOLOGY: Knowledge enabling Crones to expose connections among institutions, ideologies, and atrocities.

  Lots of new feminist dictionaries, or “dyketionaries” as they were often called, began popping up around this time in the 1970s and ’80s, though the Wickedary was surely the most famous. The authors’ idea was that if we could redefine the English language to reflect how women see the world, we could redefine the world itself too. That’s not really how language works, but Daly and Caputi weren’t the only feminists who thought English as we know it was fundamentally failing women. In 1980 feminist scholar Dale Spender published a book called Man Made Language, and in it she made the argument that since the English language was created by men, it expresses an exclusively male point of view, which through osmosis brainwashes women into thinking men’s perspectives are the only ones that matter or even exist. Thus, we need a reimagined, woman-made version of English to reverse this way of thinking.

  Logic like Spender’s was what many second-wave activists anticipated would guide the English language forward, helping progress toward gender equality in general along its way. Spender’s book reflects one interpretation of a principle known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which was proposed in the early twentieth century to explain the effects that a language has on its speakers’ worldview. There are two versions of this principle: the lighter (more widely accepted) one says that language merely influences thought, while the strong one (with which Spender’s theory aligns) says that language determines thought. By Spender’s account, the grammar and vocabulary of your native tongue inherently shape your perception of reality—if there isn’t a word to describe a certain concept in your language, then you can’t conceive of that thing at all. And since English dictionaries and grammar were made up by men, women need to invent a whole new language that puts their view of the world at the center.

  Perhaps the most admirable attempt (and biggest failure) at feminist language reform came a few years after Spender’s book, when linguist Suzette Haden Elgin tried to invent a whole new “women’s language” to replace English. In 1984 Elgin published a sci-fi dystopian novel called Native Tongue, which, much like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, is set in a postapocalyptic future where American women have no rights, only serve one societal purpose (to bear and rear children), and are completely at the mercy of their husbands and fathers. There is one exception in the Native Tongue universe: a special group of female linguists, who get to work outside the home as interpreters and facilitate communication with the aliens that have now made contact with Earth (not dissimilar from the 2016 Amy Adams movie Arrival). In their free time, these female linguists collaborate in secret to create a brand-new language called Láadan, which expresses the worldview of women only. Using this novel communication system, they plan to dethrone the patriarchy and free themselves from enslavement once and for all.

  With Láadan, Suzette Haden Elgin went way further than Daly and Caputi’s Wickedary; she made up a fully functioning language, like Klingon from Star Trek, but even more intense. Láadan was complete with a fleshed-out grammatical structure (among its features were certain modifiers that allowed speakers to clearly state their emotional intentions, which Elgin thought seemed inherently female), a sound system (including tones, like in Mandarin Chinese—Deborah Cameron thinks Elgin did this not for feminist reasons but instead because she simply “thought they were neat”), and a small core vocabulary. Elgin wanted the Láadan lexicon to include words that efficiently summed up what she thought to be common physical, social, and emotional experiences shared by women, which were otherwise unspoken or would take multiple convoluted sentences in English to describe. For example, in Láadan, there are distinct words meaning “to menstruate early,” “to menstruate painfully,” and “to menstruate joyfully.” There are words differentiating the nuances between frustration and
anger both with reason and without reason, both with someone to blame and without someone to blame. There is a verb doroledim, describing the act of a woman overeating to cope with a lack of ability to care for herself properly while at the same time feeling extreme guilt about overindulging in something as gluttonous as food. There is a noun radiidin, which translates to “a non-holiday,” or an occasion generally thought to be a holiday but is actually a burden due to women having to cook, decorate, and prepare for so many guests single-handedly. These are just a few words from the over 1,800-entry vocabulary that describe what Elgin conceived to be distinctly women-known phenomena.

  Elgin didn’t create Láadan for sheer entertainment; she sincerely hoped, and speculated, that it would have real-world political consequences. “My hypothesis,” she told an interviewer in 2007, “was that if I constructed a language designed specifically to provide a more adequate mechanism for expressing women’s perceptions, women would (a) embrace it and begin using it, or (b) embrace the idea but not the language . . . and construct some other ‘women’s language’ to replace it.”

  Obviously, neither of those things happened in the years after Native Tongue. Láadan and its nifty tones and quirky vocabulary did not replace or even make an impression on English speakers. Neither did any of the dyketionaries that were written during that time. There are inherent problems with the idea of a singular “women’s language.” As Deborah Cameron comments, “I was always skeptical about the idea of a language ‘expressing women’s perceptions.’ Which perceptions would those be, and which women would they belong to? There is no set of perceptions which all women share.” As nice as it is to believe in a collective sisterhood, women’s experiences make up a complex spectrum, and “sisterhood” doesn’t mean just one thing.

  These failed attempts at replacing dicktionaries with dyketionaries serve as evidence that the English language is, in fact, not inherently patriarchal. Pragmatically speaking, we don’t actually need to altogether reinvent the English language, no matter who wrote the grammar guides. As we’ve discovered, women are unbelievably innovative linguistically—from their slang to their word pronunciation—and can wield their existing English to express themselves just fine. Not to mention, making a language feminist does not start with making the vowels, consonants, or even vocabulary feminist. It starts with transforming the ideologies of its speakers.

  Daly, Caputi, Elgin, and Spender’s vision for the English language assumed that changing how one speaks would change their politics. It was an optimistic theory. But Lal Zimman reminds us that isn’t the order in which things occur. “Anytime language reform happens, it has to happen in the context of cultural change,” he says. “You can’t have just the linguistic change first and then expect people to get on board with the cultural stuff.”

  Those women did get a few important things right, however. For one, they managed to successfully highlight a general androcentrism that continues to exist in the making of formal language guides, due to the simple fact that jobs in lexicography, grammar, and the like were historically only available to men. (For example, did you know the word lesbian was not added to the Oxford English Dictionary until 1976? Incredibly, when it finally did get an entry, the following treasure from writer Cecil Day-Lewis was included as the example sentence: “I shall never write real poetry. Women never do, unless they’re invalids, or Lesbians, or something.”)

  Women like Elgin and Spender also accurately deduced that language is an enormous part of social reform. It’s no coincidence that Native Tongue, the Wickedary, and Robin Lakoff’s Language and Woman’s Place were published during the second-wave feminist movement. During that highly political era, social empowerment inspired linguistic empowerment.

  But interest in gender and language reform ebbs and flows. Zimman says that in the early 2000s, when he was applying to grad school and wanted to talk about transgender identity and linguistics, nobody cared. By then, people had decided the topic was too niche, not applicable. But ten or fifteen years later, issues of gender and sexual equality began rising to the cultural front lines again, and so did the language we use to talk about them.

  However, as feminist voices become louder, indicating that a social and linguistic revolution is coming, the voices of their opposers crescendo too. “We’re really seeing that this new progress narrative of marching toward a better world for all oppressed people is not going to work out as simply as people thought,” Zimman told me one foggy day in Santa Barbara. “With these social changes comes pushback.”

  This conversation with Zimman was my last interview for this book—it happened at the end of December 2017 as the Thomas Fire, one of the largest wildfires in modern California history, blazed through the hills behind us, burning thousands of acres to the ground and filling the air with ash. “The more we move in a direction of respecting nonnormative identities and a language that goes along with that, the more dramatic the pushback is going to be,” Zimman said.

  My last question for Zimman, one that I posed to Deborah Cameron as well, was about what we can realistically expect for the future of English. How long will it take for gender-neutral pronouns to become a natural part of everyday speech? Can we really invent a new vocabulary of feminist curse words? Will we ever stop hating on how young women and gay men talk? Will catcalling and slut-shaming ever disappear?

  Cameron predicts it’s going to be a bumpy road. “I think gender-neutral pronouns—or at least, one of them, they—will spread. It’s already in the system. But I don’t think misogynistic language will become any less common,” she wrote to me from Oxford. “This is a time when unfortunately misogyny is on the rise, and in this area, usage typically reflects the overall cultural mood. Misogyny won’t go unopposed but will continue.”

  Even Adam Szetela, a feminist scholar at Boston’s Berklee College of Music (an idyllic liberal enclave chock-a-block with eighteen-year-old acoustic guitar prodigies), thinks we’re in for a rough ride. “With regard to feminist language change, I think there will be—as there already is—a backlash to this progress,” he told me, reasoning that the conservative right and its “far-right stepbrother” will remain steadfast in their fight to prevent the mainstreaming of feminist values in the English language. Szetela thinks Donald Trump’s presidency in particular has had a regressive effect that will take some years to reverse. “While in certain spheres, language that was once okay is being ousted as problematic, the most powerful person in the world is modeling sexism on a routine basis . . . [with] no consequences,” he wrote to me in December 2017. “Thus, the message to young men coming of age in the era of Trump is that this is a socially acceptable way of relating to, interacting with, and speaking about women.”

  I’ve seen both sides of this trend—the positive language reform and the ensuing counterblast—show up in places as innocuous as UrbanDictionary.com, the popular online slang inventory. The specific entry that comes to mind is for the word mansplain. This popular slang term was first invented thanks to a 2008 essay by prolific author Rebecca Solnit. The essay told of a time when Solnit was forced to endure a strange man at a party patronizingly explaining the content of a history book to her, failing to let her get a word in edgewise to let him know that she, in fact, had written it. Solnit didn’t coin mansplain personally; the word first appeared in a comment on LiveJournal a month after her essay was published, and it subsequently exploded in use, first among bloggers, then the mainstream media, then everyday conversation. Mansplain was a beautiful portmanteau that filled a gap in the English language, describing a concept that so many women are familiar with but for which a word had not previously existed. It became such a sensation that in 2010, the New York Times named it one of their words of the year. Naturally, it was soon entered onto UrbanDictionary.com.

  And yet, if you were to look up Urban Dictionary’s top entries for mansplain (at least at the time I’m writing this), they do not reflect the original. Anyone can enter a word onto Urban Dictionary; its c
ontents are 100 percent crowdsourced, and the top definitions are voted on by its users. Theoretically, this has democratized how we document and define words. But sometimes, things go awry. The top three most upvoted definitions for mansplain read as follows:

  Basically when a man explains something to a woman and gets chastised for it. Seriously, you can’t make this shit up if you tried.

  When women explain things to men in a condescending attitude.

  Feminist [sic] talking down to men just because they are men.

  If I had to wager a guess, I’d predict these definitions were written by men who felt strongly and instantly attacked by women’s newfound ability to express what it felt like to be mansplained to, and who preferred to villainize women over listening to them. To me, their entries are proof that women (or any oppressed group) can come up with new words to express what were once unnamed experiences, but sometimes the backlash is louder than the progress.

  That might all sound depressing, but linguists are still optimistic that positive shifts forward are imminent. After all, even if Urban Dictionary’s definition of mansplain is a step in the wrong direction, I found the word a few months later on Merriam-Webster.com and its entry reassuringly read: “to explain something to a woman in a condescending way that assumes she has no knowledge about the topic” (which much more accurately reflects the original meaning).