Chaucer et al

[Jonathan Lighter]

IIt's usually insulting to both - though for different reasons !

  JL

Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Wilson Gray
Subject: Re: Chaucer et al
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What about the fact that both men and women can be addressed as
"blondie" or nicknamed "Blondie," despite the fact that the
quintesential "Blondie" is a female cartoon character?

-Wilson

On 11/6/06, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Jonathan Lighter
> Subject: Re: Chaucer et al
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Of whom the gods wish to destroy, they first screw up the language.
>
> JL
>
> Laurence Horn wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Laurence Horn
> Subject: Re: Chaucer et al
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is knows how deep
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