Do you have a tattoo to care for? If not, shouldn’t you ask yourself, why not? Butterflies on calves, angel wings on shoulders, Celtic crosses across chests of law-abiding citizens have superseded anchors and arrow-pierced hearts on biceps of the demimonde. The size of your body surface area is the limit, because, “YAS, this gives you life!”
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It is true that the etymology of homo confirms the biblical story of the creation of man, but I am not aware of any other word for “man” that is akin to the word for “earth.” Latin mas (long vowel, genitive maris; masculinus ends in two suffixes), whose traces we have in Engl. masculine and marital and whose reflex, via French, is Engl. male, referred to “male,” not to “man.”
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As Women’s History month comes to a close, we wanted to share an important debate that Simon Blackburn, author of Ethics: A Very Short Introduction, participated in for IAITV. Joined by Scottish feminist linguist Deborah Cameron and feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan, they look at what we can do to build a more feminist language.
Is our language inherently male? Some believe that the way we think and the words we use to describe our thoughts are masculine. Looking at our language from multiple points of views – lexically, philosophically, and historically – the debate asks if it’s possible for us to create a gender neutral language. If speech is fundamentally gendered, is there something else we can do to combat the way it is used so that it is no longer – at times – sexist?
What do you think can be done to build a more feminist language?
Simon Blackburn is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Until recently he was Edna J. Doury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, and from 1969 to 1999 a Fellow and Tutor at Pembroke College, Oxford. He is the author of Ethics: A Very Short Introduction.
The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday, subscribe to Very Short Introductions articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS, and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.
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The post Is our language too masculine? appeared first on OUPblog.
Alexandra D’Arcy is a sociolinguist by training and specializes 
in the study of language variation and change. She is an Assistant Professor in Linguistics and the Director of the newly formed Sociolinguistics Lab at the University of Victoria. This is the first of what we hope will be a monthly column from D’Arcy so be sure to check back next month.
Allow me to introduce myself: I am a language lover and a maverick.
Here’s the thing. My grandmother was the family matriarch. An educator and a philanthropist, she was among the first women to graduate from the University of British Columbia, held a Master of Library Sciences from the University of Washington, and articled at Stanford. She was fiercely independent at a time when such proclivities were less than the norm and she was a firm advocate of correctness. For all things in life there was a right way and a wrong way, so she taught her grandchildren the proper way to do things: build a fire, drink tea, address elders. Perhaps my strongest remembrance of her, though, was her almost reverent love of language and her strict belief in how it was properly used. The rules were the rules. Even as a toddler Grandmother was always Grandmother, never Grandma or Nana. Still, summers at Grandmother’s evoke bucolic memories: a musty-smelling bunk room, purple starfish stranded in tidal pools, snake dens uncovered in the underbrush, sun-drenched blackberries smothered in buttermilk and … grammar lessons over breakfast! Now, I can appreciate that few children enjoy lectures on the redundancy of at this point in time or the reason why she could be excused and yet still may not leave the table. Nor is any eight-year-old particularly enthralled by the dissection of further and farther over her morning bowl of cereal. However, such fond recollections are indelibly etched in my memories of Grandmother.
In the proud tradition of language purists, Grandmother found anything other than ‘the standard’ objectionable. But it was not only ‘bad’ grammar that bothered her. Slang, jargon, and meanings with which she was unfamiliar were also irksome. This is because, true to her prescriptivist heart, she firmly believed that any linguistic change was a bad thing. When my History of the English Language professor observed that the distinction between lay and lie was being lost among younger speakers (good luck asking a twenty-year-old to run the paradigms), I had the poor enough judgment to share this insight with Grandmother. Since I could never keep straight what was laying and who was lying, this was a lesson that resonated with me. I might as well have told her that going out in public without a bra had become the vogue. She was outraged. She demanded the name of my professor and vowed to phone the head of the department to extract an explanation: How could such as esteemed establishment, her own alma mater no less, employ such a reckless (and feckless) individual? Surely this professor was no academic!
(I don’t know if Grandmother ever followed through on that promise, but if she did, I sincerely apologize to the recipient of that particular call!)
Now, the fact that Grandmother influenced me to become a student of the English language is perhaps unremarkable in and of itself. But I didn’t actually stop there. I am not only a linguist but a sociolinguist (of all things!). I describe language as actually used and I revel in the differences and variations of langua
