The m-word

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Thu, Oct 25, 2007 at 11:42:23AM -0400, Charles Doyle wrote:
>
> A student in my Shakespeare class announced that the word
> "moist" (which I had uttered to describe Egypt in _Antony &
> Cleopatra_) is offensive to women. Some of the other women
> in the class concurred (not hostilely--just as a matter of
> information for a clueless male professor). I was somewhat
> flabergasted, and nobody would articulate a reason for the
> offensiveness--except for one male student's eventual
> suggestion that the word reminds women of sexual
> arousal. That association is not at all beside-the-point of
> my description of Egypt in the play--but why would such a
> connotation make the word offensive per se? As far as I
> could ascertain, "damp" and "wet" don't carry whatever
> stigma attaches to "moist." What am I missing here?!

This has been discussed in several recent posts on the Language
Log:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004835.html
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004896.html
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004993.html

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

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