Wordslut Read online

  Dedication

  For B, C, and D

  And in loving memory of E ♥

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 0: Meet Sociolinguistics: What All the Cool Feminists Are Talking About

  Chapter 1: Slutty Skank Hoes and Nasty Dykes: A Comprehensive List of Gendered Insults I Hate (But Also Kind of Love?)

  Chapter 2: Wait . . . What Does the Word Woman Mean Anyway?: Plus Other Questions of Sex, Gender, and the Language Behind Them

  Chapter 3: “Mm-hmm, Girl, You’re Right”: How Women Talk to Each Other When Dudes Aren’t Around

  Chapter 4: Women Didn’t Ruin the English Language—They, Like, Invented It

  Chapter 5: How to Embarrass the Shit Out of People Who Try to Correct Your Grammar

  Chapter 6: How to Confuse a Catcaller (And Other Ways to Verbally Smash the Patriarchy)

  Chapter 7: Fuck It: An Ode to Cursing While Female

  Chapter 8: “Cackling” Clinton and “Sexy” Scarjo: The Struggle of Being a Woman in Public

  Chapter 9: Time to Make This Book Just a Little Bit Gayer

  Chapter 10: Cyclops, Panty Puppet, Bald-Headed Bastard (And 100+ Other Things to Call Your Genitalia)

  Chapter 11: So . . . In One Thousand Years, Will Women Rule the English Language?

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  0

  Meet Sociolinguistics

  What All the Cool Feminists Are Talking About

  When I say the word bitch, what comes to mind? Let me guess: that girl you went to high school with—the one with the small nose who wore Britney Spears perfume and never invited you to her house parties. No? Then perhaps the word bitch conjures images of an old boss, or a roommate, or some famous she-villain like Cruella de Vil, that unholy puppy-murdering shmuck. Maybe the word bitch instantly catapults Kellyanne Conway’s face to your mind, like a jack-in-the-box straight from hell. Or maybe, if you’re a literal sort, it makes you think of a female dog. No matter your species, there are just so many ways for a gal to be a bitch.

  But what if I told you that eight hundred years ago, the word bitch had nothing to do with women (or canines, for that matter)? What if I told you that before modern English existed, an early version of the word bitch was actually just another word for genitalia—anyone’s genitalia—and that only after a long and colorful evolution did it come to describe a female beast, naturally leading to its current meaning: a bossy, evil, no-fun lady. What if I told you that this process of a totally neutral or even positive word devolving into some insult for women happens in the English language all the time? What if I told you that swimming under the surface of almost every word we say, there is a rich, glamorous, sometimes violent history infinitely more dramatic than any Disney movie or CNN debate? What if I told you that without even realizing it, language is impacting all of our lives in an astonishing, filthy, and fascinating way?

  Cozy up, dear reader. Because this is a book about the psychedelic universe that exists behind the English language. Words are something so many of us take for granted, which of course makes perfect sense. We start learning language straight out of the womb (truly, at six weeks old we’re already experimenting with vowel sounds), and from then on, we come to wield it so naturally that we never really consider why it works the way it does. Growing up, I had no idea that there was a whole academic field dedicated to examining every infinitesimal detail of how language operates, from what your tongue is doing when you make an r sound to why Americans love British accents so much.*

  But every part of our speech—our words, our intonation, our sentence structures—is sending invisible signals telling other people who we are. How to treat us. In the wrong hands, speech can be used as a weapon. But in the right ones, it can change the world. That may sound melodramatic, though I promise it isn’t. Take it from a language scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara named Lal Zimman, who told me that one of our culture’s biggest obstacles is the idea that language doesn’t matter the way that other, more tangible forms of freedom and oppression do. It’s that old mythology that sticks and stones may break your bones but words can never hurt you. “Getting people to understand that language itself is a means through which people can be harmed, elevated, or valued is really important,” Zimman says.

  Zimman, like most of the other word whizzes I talked to for this book, is a linguist, a profession that (despite common misconceptions) has nothing to do with learning to speak dozens of foreign languages or correcting people’s split infinitives. Linguistics is, in fact, the scientific study of how language works in the real world. Under that umbrella falls sociolinguistics, where the studies of language and human sociology intersect. It actually wasn’t that long ago (around the 1970s) when linguists first began studying how human beings use language as a social tool to do things like create solidarity, form relationships, and assert authority. Out of everything they investigated, the most eye-opening and contentious subject has undoubtedly been language and gender—that is, how people use language to express gender, how gender impacts how a person talks, and how their speech is perceived. Over the decades linguists have learned that pretty much every corner of language is touched by gender, from the most microscopic units of sound to the broadest categories of conversation. And because gender is directly linked to power in so many cultures, necessarily, so is language. It’s just that most of us can’t see it.

  Speaking of power, you may or may not have heard of a little thing called patriarchy: a societal structure in which men are the central figures. Human societies haven’t always been patriarchal—scholars believe man’s rule began somewhere around 4000 BCE. (Homo sapiens have been around for two hundred thousand years in all, for context.) When people talk about “smashing the patriarchy,” they’re talking about challenging this oppressive system, linguistically and otherwise. Which is relevant to us because in Western culture, patriarchy has overstayed its welcome.

  It’s high time the subject of gender and words makes its way beyond academia and into the rest of our everyday conversations. Because twenty-first-century America finds itself in a unique and turbulent place for language. Every day, people are becoming freer than ever to express gender identities and sexualities of all stripes, and simultaneously, the language we use to describe ourselves evolves. This is interesting and important, but for some, it can be hard to keep up, which can make an otherwise well-meaning person confused and defensive.

  We’re also living in a time when we find respected media outlets and public figures circulating criticisms of women’s voices—like that they speak with too much vocal fry, overuse the words like and literally, and apologize in excess. They brand judgments like these as pseudofeminist advice aimed at helping women talk with “more authority” so that they can be “taken more seriously.” What they don’t seem to realize is that they’re actually keeping women in a state of self-questioning—keeping them quiet—for no objectively logical reason other than that they don’t sound like middle-aged white men.

  More troubling still, there are also plenty of folks—usually ones of some social privilege—who want to stop language from evolving at all costs. These are the grumps you may find dismissing gender-neutral language as ungrammatical, refusing to learn the difference between sex and gender, or lamenting the inability to throw around the word slut willy-nilly without being called sexist, like they could in the good old days. Sensing the grounds of linguistic change quaking beneath them, these humans take phenomena like vocal fry and gender-free pronouns as a spine-chilling omen that their dominance in the world is at stake. So they dig their heels in, hoping that if they can k
eep English as they know it from changing—a futile effort, as any linguist will tell you—the social hierarchies that they so benefit from will remain intact.

  We’re living in an era when many of us often feel overwhelmed and silenced by the English language. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can take it back. And in this book, you’re going to learn how.

  But first: a history lesson. Because taking back the English language can’t work unless we know where it came from in the first place. Can’t cure a disease unless you figure out what causes it, you know? The good news is that the English language was not literally invented by a group of white dudes in robes sitting in a room deciding on the rules (though sometimes that is very much the case, like in France—more on that later). For the most part, however, that’s not how language works. Instead, it develops organically.

  To get us started on this linguistic journey together, allow me to present a brief time line of how the English language was born.

  In the fifth century AD, a trio of Germanic tribes from Scandinavia called the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes show up at the British Isles unannounced. (Maybe they arrive nicely, maybe they arrive violently; historians aren’t totally sure—but judging by their sharp metal accessories, I’m willing to wager a guess.) These tribes speak a language called Englisc, which kind of sounds like a troll language from Lord of the Rings, with lots of rolled r’s, dark vowels, and throaty, phlegmy consonants. This lingo, along with the north Germanic languages spoken by Vikings (who came a few centuries later), pushes Britain’s Celtic languages to the outskirts of the country. The little bit of Celtic that’s left behind combines with these other guys’ languages to eventually become what we know as Old English (totally incomprehensible today, unless you’re an Old English scholar, in which case, hello and welcome, fellow nerd).

  Old English is spoken in Britain until 1066 AD, when the Duke of Normandy (aka William the Conqueror, aka a terrifying little man with a long, gray beard and a fabulous bejeweled crown) invades England, murders a bunch of people, and brings along with him an early form of French. For the few hundred years that follow, there is a sort of linguistic class divide in Britain, where the poor speak English and the rich speak French. But then the black death sweeps through and kills off about a third of the population. This makes the working class way more important to the country’s economy, and by the fourteenth century, English is the dominant language of Britain again. But at this point, the language, heavily influenced by French, has evolved into a new form called Middle English (which you’ve probably seen in the swirly fonts of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales).

  A few hundred years go by, and then a linguistic phenomenon known as the Great Vowel Shift begins. Within less than a century, vowels get significantly shorter (in fact, they’re still in a process of shortening), es at the ends of words become silent, and the overall sound of the English language changes dramatically. Also by the 1500s, the travel-enabled British have started mingling with loads of different people and languages around the world, and this influences English too. So does the European Renaissance, during which there is a resurgence in the desire for education, a decline of the feudal system, and the invention of new technologies—the most important being, with regard to language anyway, the printing press.

  The printing press is a big deal, and thanks to this snazzy new ability to mass manufacture newspapers and books, literacy increases; that, in turn, creates a need for a new standard language to print. So spelling and grammar are streamlined, and ultimately, the dialect of London, where most of the publishing business is headquartered, becomes the standard form of English. According to that standard, the first English dictionary is published in 1604 (it contains only 2,449 words; for perspective, Webster’s Third New International Unabridged Dictionary, addendum included, boasts a whopping 470,000).

  It’s around this time in the early 1600s when colonization of North America takes off, and America’s own dialect of English, influenced by French and Spanish colonists as well as the West African slave trade, eventually follows. Then the industrial revolution and technology happen, and with the innovation of new stuff and ideas (from steam engines, dynamite, and vaccines to computers and the internet), tons of new words enter the lexicon. Within a few hundred years, modern American English is born.

  You may or may not have noticed, but most of the main characters in this story are men: the army dudes, the aristocracy, the merchants and laborers, the printers, the dictionary makers, the industry and technology folks. Because we live in a society where, historically, it hasn’t been as easy for women to do cool things, it’s been hard for them to help define the world from a position of power (though, as it turns out, women do have an enormous impact on how language evolves from the bottom up, which is its own kind of power, and we’ll learn all about that very soon).

  The link between language and culture is inextricable: language has always been, and continues to be, used to reflect and reinforce power structures and social norms. Because old white dudes have ruled our culture for so long, and language is the medium through which that culture was created and communicated, the time has come to challenge how and why we use language the way we do, and how we think about it in the first place. That means questioning the words we speak every day, as well as the contexts in which we use them—because without realizing it, something as simple as an address term or curse word might be reinforcing a power structure that we ultimately don’t agree with.

  I asked Deborah Cameron, a feminist linguist at Oxford University and personal hero of mine, about how exactly the English language got so sexist—is it inherently that way? Fortunately, Cameron doesn’t think gendered prejudices are fundamentally built into the language’s DNA—its vowels, its consonants. Instead, it’s the way English is habitually used that “expresses (and so reproduces) some culturally ingrained sexist assumptions.” This means—good news—the English language is not innately biased against women and nonbinary genders; but the bad news is that its speakers have collectively consented to wield it in a way that reinforces existing gender biases, often in ways they’re not even conscious of.

  One of the sneakiest ways these biases show up is that in our language, as in our culture, maleness is seen as the default. This thinking manifests in countless contexts we’ll explore later, but first we can consider the idea that, in a sense, man and person are oftentimes synonymous in English. “For example, if someone begins their story with ‘I saw this person the other day . . . ,’ chances are that hearers of that story will most often understand this unmarked ‘person’ to be a . . . middle-class white man until further specified,” says Scott Kiesling, a scholar of language and masculinity at the University of Pittsburgh. “Men are still very often the invisible standard against which a group’s language is compared.”

  Hinging on that idea is the pervasive assumption that many esteemed professions—surgeons,* scientists, lawyers, writers, actors (even nonhuman actors*)—are perceived male unless proven otherwise. These subtle preconceptions are reflected when we say things like female doctor or woman scientist, implying that such positions are inherently male, while models, nurses, and prostitutes are all default female.

  Something analogous happens with the trend of inserting the word man before what we consider “girl” words: manbun, manbag, guyliner.* These words are catchy, but in the end they accentuate the idea that objects often thought to be frivolous, like makeup and handbags, are for women, and if men are expected to participate (without being shoved into a locker, that is), they must be rebranded in a macho way. Similarly, words like mompreneur, SHE-EO, and girlboss illuminate the notion that entrepreneur and CEO are not actually gender-neutral terms but are tacitly coded as male. They suggest that when a woman endeavors in business, we can’t help but to cutesy-fy her title. Mompreneur may read as a sparkling emblem of girl power, and it certainly makes for a good hashtag, but in practice, terms like that don’t quite work to undo implicit sexism in langua
ge—they reinforce it.

  Gendered thinking is also encoded in our colossal vocabulary of sexualized terms for women (ho, tramp, skank; stay tuned for more in chapter 1) for which there is no male parallel. Even positive gendered language shapes how we see ourselves: just think of the exceptionally gendered compliments we receive as young children. “Praise for little boys is more likely to include words like smart and clever,” Cameron says, “while for little girls it’s more about pretty, cute.” These patterns are so ingrained, I’ve even caught myself praising my two cats for the same silly accomplishment by saying “good boy” and “pretty girl.” Such disparities could, and usually do, end up informing how kids (though probably not cats) see themselves for years to come.

  Gender biases have existed in language ostensibly forever, but only now does English-speaking culture find itself in the position to make a language revolution actually happen. This is because for the first time in history we have both the concrete linguistic data and the emotional momentum to inspire tangible differences in how we talk about gender and how we perceive the speech of men, women, and everyone in between.

  Compared to the centuries-old studies of physics or geology, the study of language and gender is brand-spanking new: before the 1970s, there was simply no canon of empirical data on the subject. The dawn of this field of study coincided with the second-wave feminist movement, when there was a larger political need to understand the hidden sexism in English. Anyone who was anyone in the field of sociolinguistics at the time wanted to talk about how people use language every day to create and reflect their gender. But these ideas hadn’t been formally analyzed before, and linguists got a lot of things wrong. Scholars had a ton of learning to do. But by the late 1980s and early ’90s, mainstream culture’s urgency about feminism had dimmed, along with much of the research. (Although, there were luckily still many scholars of color making strides in feminist theory even though it wasn’t academically in vogue anymore, like Kimberlé Crenshaw, who came up with the concept of intersectionality* in 1989.) Overall, progress was stymied.