Chaucer et al

[Jonathan Lighter]

Of whom the gods wish to destroy, they first screw up the language.

  JL

Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re: Chaucer et al
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At 4:05 PM -0500 11/6/06, Wilson Gray wrote:
>This distinction is / was actually *taught*? I learned it solely from
>seeing how it was used in the print medium. And now someone is
>claiming / has claimed that this patterning is sexist?! Hence, only
>the use of the masculine form is correct?! Doesn't this strike anyone
>but me as sexism with its brains blown out? If the *masculine* form is
>made the only correct form, doesn't that simply underline the
>supposedly-implied claim that the feminine is subordinate to the
>masculine? Make the *feminine* form the standard form and I may begin
>to see this as something more than simply white folk with too much
>money and too much time on their hands, giving them the leisure to
>sweat this kind of triviality. How soon will it be before someone
>points out the sexism inherent in the distinction between "widower"
>and "widow"?

Actually, 36 years ago--Robin Lakoff in _Language and Women's Place_
(1975) discusses the fact that in this case (unlike "chairman" etc.)
the term with female reference is morphologically unmarked, because,
she argued, we're more willing to define women in terms of their
relationship to their spouse (even a dead one) than to so define men,
and points out the difference between referring to Mrs. Jones as John
Jones's widow than referring to Mr. Smith as Jane Smith's widower.
(Actually, there are counterexamples of the sort one would expect:
Ted Hughes as Sylvia Plath's widower, and such, as long as the dead
woman is more famous than man left behind.)

But to repeat--it's at best (or worst) vanishingly rare to encounter
a feminist argument against the (purported) sexism of "blonde"
because of the -e. It's much more common to come across feminist
arguments against the use of "blonde" as a nominal to refer to women
when "blond(e)", with or without an -e, is never (or much less
frequently) used as a noun to refer to men; such observations go back
to the late 1970s (Miller & Swift's _Words and Women_, 1977) and
early 1980s.

If the former argument hadn't been mentioned by Jon, I'd have been
inclined to dismiss it as an urban legend.

LH

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