*Ma’am is not considered so objectionable by all English speakers. In British English, the term is considered so formal and deferent that one would only use it for nobility, never an everyday person. My friends in the American South also by and large find ma’am to be a polite and expected courtesy, and would use it to address women of any age or marital status, from teachers and mothers-in-law to young girls. The rules of linguistic politeness differ significantly from language to language and culture to culture. (I personally still hate ma’am, though.)
*This is a non–gender-specific honorific that was coined in the 1970s and officially added to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary in September 2017.
*One of my greatest cultural pet peeves is the belief that watching, playing, and talking about sports are more prestigious and valuable than taking an interest in beauty or fashion. I once worked at a beauty magazine where most of the staff was female but several of the higher-ups were men. It was hard not to notice how tirelessly these guys worked to assert their manliness by making sports references in all their company-wide presentations, only to immediately suggest that they were surely going over our silly female heads. Objectively, there is nothing more complicated or of greater consequence about discussing who won the World Series than there is about discussing who put on the most beautiful show at New York Fashion Week; it’s simply that the former is generally a more male-centric endeavor and thus perceived as more important. *Blows tiny puff of steam out of ears
*The word gossip didn’t always have such negative (or gendered) connotations: the noun form of gossip originated in Old English with godsibb, meaning “god sibling,” or the gender-nonspecific godparent of one’s child. In part we have Shakespeare to blame for the word’s pejoration. He can be found labeling female characters (but never males) gossips in a derogatory sense, like in this line from Titus Andronicus: “Shall she live to betray this guilt of ours—A long-tongued babbling gossip?”
*Another fun example of amelioration: Did you know that in Middle English, the word nice actually meant foolish or stupid? The word first entered our lexicon via Old French in the twelfth century, when nice was meant as a jab for a weak, clumsy simpleton. Over the centuries, it evolved to mean timid, then fussy, then dainty, then careful. It wasn’t until the year 1830 when we landed on its current, more positive meaning.
*Columbia University linguist John McWhorter took over Lexicon Valley in 2016, and thankfully he cares very much about collecting data before claiming to be right about something.
*The same sentiment is true of tag questions: in the 1980s, Deborah Cameron conducted a pair of studies at Oxford proving that tag questions are highly nuanced and can serve over half a dozen different purposes depending on the interaction and dynamic between participants. Gender has almost nothing to do with how many tags one uses, and while gender has something to do with the type of tags used, a person’s level of power in an interaction is way more relevant. Better yet, the specific types of tags women favored were actually associated with more power, not less. The study showed that women use more “facilitative” tags, which express interest and solidarity, and invite other speakers into the conversation (e.g., “Game of Thrones was great last night, wasn’t it?”). Facilitative tags are also consistently used by people in so-called powerful interactional positions, regardless of gender, like courtroom judges and talk show hosts. Meanwhile, men are shown to use more “modal” tags, which humbly request information (“John Quincy Adams was the fourth US president, right?”). Equally, there is a pattern associating modal tags with “powerless” speakers (like classroom students and defendants on the witness stand). This is also regardless of gender.
*Taken from an actual note I saw once on the fridge at a former job. (I didn’t steal the soda, I swear.)
*Cornell linguist Sally McConnell-Ginet has pointed out that in English, “natural gender” is really a misnomer, since in many cases, the gendered words we use to describe someone (or something) do not describe a noun’s “natural sex” but instead our interpretation of its gender. For this reason, she suggests we rename our system “notional gender.” I’m on board with this concept, but for our purposes, I’m going to stick to using the term “natural gender,” though the term will almost always be surrounded by a set of skeptical quotation marks. Gotta take your sociolinguistic jargon with a grain of salt, you know?
*A moment of silence for how phallic this word is.
*This is a huge family of several hundred languages ranging from Russia to Europe to the Middle East and parts of India. A language family is a group of related languages that descend from a common parent language. About 46 percent of the human population speaks an Indo-European language as their mother tongue, so you can think of English, Punjabi, Persian, and lots of others as distant cousins of the same great-great-great-grand-lingo.
*I put “preferred pronouns” in quotes because many nonbinary folks see it as a misnomer. The argument is that pronouns aren’t preferred or unpreferred—they’re either correct or incorrect. To a nonbinary person, being referred to with a gendered pronoun would be just as inaccurate as someone using the word he to describe my mom. It’s not a preference thing; it’s an accuracy thing.
*For the record, messing up they’re/their/there or your/you’re/yore would technically be an issue of spelling, not grammar . . . but it’s pedantry all the same.
*In AAVE, phrases like “he be singing” and “he be eating” feature a unique grammatical tense called “habitual be.” A common misconception is that AAVE speakers arbitrarily use be instead of is in every situation, but the two actually mean something different. Habitual be is used to mark a repeated or customary action, so while a sentence like “He is singing” would mean “he is currently singing,” the sentence “He be singing” would mean he is someone who sings all the time. In a famous 2005 experiment, young speakers of both standard English and AAVE were shown images of Elmo eating cookies while Cookie Monster watched. Both sets of kids agreed that Elmo is eating cookies, but the AAVE speakers said that Cookie Monster be eating cookies, because that’s a known habit of his character.
*The word hysteria has been gendered for millennia. Derived from the Ancient Greek word for womb, by the nineteenth century it had evolved to describe a “female mental disorder” characterized by emotional instability without cause. It is theorized that a common treatment for hysteria during that time was something called “hysterical paroxysm,” which involved a male doctor masturbating a female patient to orgasm. Today, mental health experts thankfully understand that hysteria is not a real disorder. And yet the word hysterical remains, a ghost from a time when if you were a woman with a legitimate illness, you could expect to have a doctor invalidate you, then diddle you, and think that was all quite normal and good. Which is enough to make a person go truly crazy.
*It’s true, most people I spoke with agree that ignoring the catcalls—not giving these speakers the time of day—feels like the smartest move. “My most effective strategy has always been to pretend I am so consumed by everything else going on around me that I don’t even hear or notice the catcaller,” a twenty-four-year-old from Atlanta, Georgia, told me in an Instagram message. “I get the sense that this makes them feel small, which is how being catcalled makes me feel . . . so HA!”
*Thankfully, using sexist remarks like this in the courtroom was banned by the American Bar Association in 2016. (In Canada, lawyers are required to address one another with stock gender-neutral phrases like “my learned friend,” which I think is a charming solution.)
*My favorite example of religious-themed curse words comes from French-speaking Canada. Their strongest swears are based on traditional Catholic props, including tabarnak, meaning “tabernacle,” and j’men calice, meaning “I don’t give a chalice.”
*Indeed, across the pond, what America would consider a squeaky-clean word for your backside is actually a semi-lewd term for the frontside.
*I tend to curse more out of joy than ang
er, but if you want to go the aggressive route with your feminist swears, Fricke suggests that women “victimize” the male organ—“For example, ‘Shove a catheter up it.’” For this strategy to work, she says it should always be called a penis or something that sounds equally soft, limp, and devoid of the strong stop consonants in dick and cock.
*Studies show that taller folks often have bigger, lower airways and lungs, and that extra space produces a deeper sound. Bigger men don’t always have lower-pitched voices, though. Have you ever analyzed the speech of British soccer player David Beckham? Very manly guy, surprisingly dainty voice.
*Actually, pitch is not really a variable in the gay voice equation. As long as you speak with nasality, sibilant s’s, and upspeak, you can “sound gay” whether you have a voice as high as that of the writer David Sedaris (who often complains of being mistaken for a woman on the phone) or as deep as that of Project Runway’s Tim Gunn (who, despite his rich bass, told David Thorpe that the first time he heard his voice on TV, he was “appalled”).
*You might have heard people from small towns, or people from older generations, claim that “no one sounded gay” where they grew up. University of Minnesota linguist Benjamin Munson has a pretty reasonable explanation for this, which is that in a more conservative place or time period, it might have been so taboo to be gay that listeners didn’t even allow their minds to entertain the idea, no matter how many sibilant s’s were tossed around. It could also be true that in less cosmopolitan areas, there simply wasn’t enough of a gay culture for anyone to know what the “gay voice” sounded like in the first place. Thus, no one learned it, used it, or heard it.
*Latinx, by the way, is a term that’s emerged as a gender-neutral alternative to Latino and Latina. The Huffington Post’s “Latino Voices” column considers the word “part of a ‘linguistic revolution’ that aims to move beyond gender binaries and is inclusive of the intersecting identities of Latin American descendants.” Not everyone is in love with Latinx (for one, it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue while you’re speaking Spanish), but again, gender-neutral language is an ongoing conversation, and this is what’s in use at the time I’m writing this.
*The on-screen depiction of oral sex performed on women has consistently earned movies an NC-17 rating—Blue Valentine, Boys Don’t Cry, and Charlie Countryman are a few that come to mind. The same standard has certainly not been applied to on-screen blow jobs. I often think of 2013’s Lovelace, a biopic about the star of the 1972 porn film Deep Throat. This was an entire movie dedicated to fellatio, and to extreme sexual violence, and even that was given a mild R. Sure, let the kids watch a porn star get repeatedly raped, but female desire? No, no, no.
*This is one of my personal favorite synonyms for sex. It comes on loan from the Yiddish word meaning “to push,” and has been employed by wordy American Jews like myself since the mid-1960s.
*Formerly known as “sex reassignment surgery.”
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