Wordslut
Page 21
Historically, the English language has also seen progressive movements on a larger scale—an encouraging sign for the future. “Languages go in a more feminist direction when there’s widespread support for feminism (as in the 1970s, say),” Cameron told me, “so what we can do is keep on fighting for feminism in general, and refuse to be silenced.”
A big part of that refusal, according to Zimman, means understanding the inherent politics reflected in our language use and in the linguistic studies currently being conducted. “We can’t just pretend to be doing dispassionate linguistics and not recognize that these things are already extremely political and that we may even have a responsibility to those politics,” Zimman says. “I think there’s an overall move . . . to taking responsibility for the implications of what we’re doing.” In other words, like in the 1970s, academia and activism are merging, and this can be really powerful.
But we’re not all academics. In my personal opinion, one of the most meaningful things the rest of us everyday folks can do amid so much political pushback is to move through life with the confident knowledge that every persecuted element of our speech—the hedges, the upspeak, the lisps, the vocal fry—is there for a logical, powerful, and provable reason. When someone tries to question your voice or use sexist words against you, knowing exactly what is motivating them to do so and why it’s misinformed could help you open up a dialogue with them, which in my experience is an amazing icebreaker even if you otherwise have very little in common. Everybody inherently wants to know why people talk the way they do, and if you have some information about that, they’re likely to listen.
I was once at a friend’s backyard barbecue where this one guest, a guy in his early thirties wearing a gray suit and a nice watch, began telling the group about a woman on a news show he was watching earlier that day. He said she was messing up her side of the debate because she kept saying “you know, you know, you know” over and over, and it sounded like she didn’t know what she was talking about. “I would have listened to her if she’d have just quit it with that,” he said. And when he did, it reminded me of the Upper East Side mom who chastised me for saying “y’all” back in college.
“I actually know a little something about the phrase you know,” I interjected. I then proceeded to tell this guy how you know is not just a mindless filler, but rather a discourse marker with a purpose. I told him about how women actually use it to display confidence a lot of time, and how hedges generally work as essential tools for creating trust and empathy in controversial conversations but are often misinterpreted because of cultural myths about women, self-assuredness, and authority. “To tell the truth, I’ve heard you use you know maybe a dozen times tonight,” I told the guy with a smile. “It’s not a bad thing.”
After I finished my little spiel about you know, this guy looked at me with these sort of big, surprised eyes and said, completely genuinely, might I add, “Wow, it’s cool you know so much about how people talk. You must be the most interesting person in every room.”
I am certainly not the most interesting person in any room (and thank goodness for that). But my point in telling this story is that language can be a really useful entry point—a horizontally oriented topic, if you will—to talk about larger ideas of gender equality, especially if you’re armed with cool, nerdy facts like the usage patterns and social utility of you know.
The ultimate goal is to avoid at all costs the dystopian patriarchal future depicted in Native Tongue—to move our culture little by little in the opposite direction. “Overall, I’m optimistic,” Lal Zimman tells me over the phone with a wistful cheer. “I think the culture is changing in a way that will result in more good things for people who need good things.”
I can tell Zimman and I are cut from the same cloth in this way—just a couple of wide-eyed language geeks who believe with our whole hearts (and brains) that change is just around the corner. “I have to be optimistic, to make it through,” he says with a laugh. “You have to believe that it’s possible.”
Acknowledgments
Sometimes I get so giddy that a whole slew of smart, accomplished people agreed to let me write this book that it makes me feel like my internal organs might implode. First, I need to thank my sensational superhero agent, Rachel Vogel at Dunow, Carlson, and Lerner, for taking a chance on me, guiding me, talking me up when I was too far down, down when I was too far up, and straight-up changing my life forever. Next, my editors at Harper Wave: the masterful Karen Rinaldi and astute Rebecca Raskin, who whipped me into shape and pushed me to turn a jumble of half thoughts and internet-y jokes into a real book, teaching me skills I’ll carry with me forever. My gratitude overflows.
To my parents, world-class scientists Craig and Denise Montell, for always believing hardcore in their wild card of a daughter and letting me follow my wacky dreams. Thank you for the genetic gift of tenacity, for setting an example for how to work hard (and play harder), and for always making me feel like you’re proud of me. It’s mutual, I promise.
To my little (but tall) brother, the scarily intelligent Google software engineer Brandon Montell, for making me feel so sibling-rivalrous that I had to write a book just to feel like I had a shot in hell of competing with your mind and achievements.
To my smart, luminous, encouraging friends, especially Rachel Wiegand (thanks for reading early drafts of this thing, dude). This might be cringey, but I also want to shout out the Instagram followers who messaged me and cheered me on as I posted throughout my writing process—those DMs seriously meant the world.
To my many creative mentors and spirit guides, including Kerri Kolen (whom I think of as this book’s “birth mom”), Sarah Murphy, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Brett Paesel, Rebecca Odes, and Jill Soloway, who when I was twenty-two years old believed I had something to say to the world with basically no evidence that that was true and gave me a space to do it. I am in awe and so, so thankful.
To my supportive bosses at Clique, who let me take six months off my job to write this thing and welcomed me back with open arms.
To my gifted photographer pal Katie Neuhof for taking my author photo and to L.A. designer Anine Bing for dressing me in those nifty threads for it.
To my talented illustrator, Rose Wong, for making these chapters look so sparkly and special.
And finally, to the mind-bendingly brilliant linguists who talked to me for this book, especially Lal Zimman, Deborah Cameron, Sonja Lanehart, and my former NYU professor Louise O. Vasvári, who introduced me to the topic of language and gender in the first place. My linguistics degree was supposed to be impractical, but damn, it worked out. I am so grateful it hurts. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
About the Author
AMANDA MONTELL is a writer and reporter from Baltimore with a BA in linguistics from New York University. Her favorite English word is nook and her favorite foreign word is tartle, the Scottish term for the moment you go to introduce someone but realize you have forgotten their name. Amanda lives in Los Angeles. This is her first book.
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Copyright
WORDSLUT. Copyright © 2019 by Amanda Montell. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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*This, by the way, has to do with a fetish for the exotic, plus a set of mommy issues that colonial countries tend to have with their motherlands. Hypothetically, if Martians established colonies on Venus, you can almost guarantee the Venusians would find a Mars accent super sexy.
*Perhaps you’ve heard this feminist riddle: “A young boy was rushed to the hospital from the scene of an accident, where his father was killed, and prepped for emergency surgery. The surgeon walked in, took one look, and said, ‘I can’t operate on him—that’s my son.’ How is this possible?” This scenario trips people up because if the boy’s father is dead, how could he be operating on him? Few come to the conclusion that the surgeon was in fact his mother. The rare and exotic lady surgeon.
*I mention the nonhuman variety because of the default male thinking unwittingly expressed when people interact with animals. “Go to a zoo and listen to dozens of parents automatically referring to every random animal as ‘he’ when they talk to their children,” says Cameron, who’s even observed this with animals that are visibly female, like lionesses with no mane.
*Guyliner, mansplain, shero, dykon, bromance, and fratriarchy are just a few of the many memorable portmanteaus that exist in the vocabulary of language and gender. A portmanteau, by the way, is a play on words that blends sounds from multiple words to produce a fun hybrid. This is not to be confused with a pun, which exploits the meanings of two different words that sound the same, as in, “You can tune a guitar, but you can’t tuna fish. Unless, of course, you play bass!”
*ˌin-tər-ˌsek-shə-ˈna-lə-tē: the complex, cumulative way in which the effects of multiple forms of discrimination (such as racism, sexism, and classism) combine, overlap, or intersect, especially in the experiences of marginalized individuals or groups (Merriam-Webster, accessed November 10, 2018).
*Fun fact about y’all usage: I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, where there’s a tiny bit of y’all happening—more so than in any state north of the Mason-Dixon line—but you don’t hear it nearly as often as you would in the proper South. The state that uses it the most, according to dialect maps? Mississippi, y’all.
*In season 1 of the comedy series Broad City, Ilana Glazer’s character proudly calls her vagina “nature’s pocket” after divulging her habit of discreetly transporting marijuana inside of it. And if that’s not proof of the Old Norse theory, then I don’t know what is.
*Although, sometimes there are big semantic differences between how women and men use the same animal metaphors. A 2013 study from the University of Belgrade in Serbia looked at each gender’s usage of identical animal words to describe women, and the results were intriguing: While men used the Serbian word for bitch to describe “a playful woman who enjoys and readily engages in promiscuous sex,” women used it to refer to “a shallow, conceited, or frivolous woman.” While the word for pig was used by men to describe sloppy, untidy women, women used it to call other women fat. (These are just a few examples.)
*I love cats but I don’t love how people describe women as “catty,” often labeling physical and even verbal altercations between women as “cat fights” (a phrase invigorated by television shows like The Bachelor and The Real Housewives). Meanwhile, when we compare dudes to felines, they get to be “cool cats.”
*According to lexicographer Eric Partridge, there was a Canadian expression in the 1880s that went, “Next time you make a pie, will you give me a piece?” This, I regret to report, was something a man might say to a woman to hint that she should “sexually cooperate with him.”
*They do it slightly differently, though: there are a few dessert-y words that can be used as gender-neutral terms of endearment or, if you’re in the American South, terms of politeness (I can hear my Louisianian aunts now: “Do you need anything else, sugar?”). This is obviously different than if, say, a judge in a courtroom were to call a woman attorney sugar or sweetie. Context will typically reveal if a term is being used in an objectifying way or a courteous one.
*As the legendary Betty White once said, “Why do people say ‘grow some balls?’ Balls are weak and sensitive. If you wanna be tough, grow a vagina. Those things can take a pounding.”
*The same cannot always be said for how men in hip-hop use bitch. In 2011 a pair of scholars named Terri Adams and Douglas Fuller wrote that misogynistic rap often depicts bitches as women who are “money-hungry, scandalous, manipulating, and demanding” (Snoop Dogg: “Bitches ain’t shit but hoes and tricks/Lick on these nuts and suck the dick”) or subordinated men (Dr. Dre: “I used to know a bitch named Eric Wright”). Men’s use of the word bitch in hip-hop isn’t all bad, though: for one, we have 1980s rapper Too $hort to thank for coining the term beeyatch, which I’m personally grateful for.
*And not every insult that an in-group reclaims is meant for everyone’s use. Take the n-word: from the early nineteenth century until roughly the 1980s, this word was only ever used as one of abuse, but, with the help of hip-hop artists like Missy Elliott and Jay-Z, it was taken back by black communities. However, to many African-Americans, this is a term that non-black people should simply never use. In 2017 writer and cultural critic Ta-Nehisi Coates was asked how he felt about white people using the “reclaimed” version of the n-word when reciting song lyrics, and he made the point that because our relationship to loaded words depends on our relationship to the oppression associated with them, not every reappropriated slur gets to belong to every group. Coates said, “The experience of being a hip-hop fan and not being able to use the word ni**er . . . will give you just a little peek into the world of what it means to be black. Because to be black is to walk through the world and watch people doing things that you cannot do.”
*Another fun example of pejoration: a few hundred years ago, spinster was merely a job title for someone who spun yarn (which was usually a woman but not always). However, because women who spun to support themselves often did so because they didn’t have husbands, the word became associated with the unwed. (It was once even a legal term for single women.) By the 1700s, spinster had stooped to describe women who were old, haggard, and bitter.
*Intersex is a term that generally refers to a number of conditions in which a person is born with reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t quite fit our traditional definition of female or male. To be born intersex is not as rare as people think. According to research conducted in 2000, the total percentage of people whose bodies differ from standard male or female (which could mean variations in chromosomes, hormones, gonads, or genitals) is 1.7 percent. That’s approximately the same percentage of natural redheads in the United States.
*This isn’t to say feminists weren’t thinking about the differences between sex and gender before they had distinct labels to describe them. Simone de Beauvoir’s famous 1949 quote, “One is not born,
but rather becomes, a woman,” implies a clear understanding of the culture versus body discrepancy, even though nowhere in it does the word gender appear.
*Back in Chaucer’s day, the word girl meant a child of any sex. In Old English, pretty meant crafting or cunning. In Middle English, dinner literally meant breakfast.
*Though I have heard of a gender identity called a genderfuck, which is defined by one who presents clashing or incongruous gender signals. A genderfuck (sometimes called a genderpunk) might wear makeup but also have a beard and might use a variety of different pronouns interchangeably (sometimes going by she, sometimes by he, sometimes by they). I imagine such an identity would make most of our great-uncles rather disoriented, which, as I take it, is part of the point.
*ICYMI: A more accepted way to refer to a person’s physiology outside of their gender is not to say “biologically female” or “biologically male,” but instead to say AFAB or AMAB, which stand for “assigned female at birth” and “assigned male at birth.” The idea is that the sex of a person is not necessarily a “biological fact” but is instead determined by a doctor’s brief evaluation of a baby’s genitalia without taking into consideration any of their other sex characteristics (and certainly not their gender identity—not that a newborn baby has one yet). Also, while we’re talking abbreviations, ICYMI stands for “in case you missed it.” ICYMI.