The m-word

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 10/25/07, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> On Oct 25, 2007, at 8:42 AM, Charlie 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...
>
> see the Moist Chronicles on Language Log:
>
> ML, 8/20/07: Ask Language Log: The moist panties phenomenon:
>   http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004835.html
>
> ML, 9/10/07: Morning mailbag:
>   http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004896.html
>
> ML, 10/6/07: The long moist tail:
>   http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004993.html
>
> (note in the last a reference to the facebook group I HATE the word
> MOIST!)
>
> these are about "word aversions", especially to the "cringe word"
> "moist".  the aversion to the word seems to be much stronger among
> women than among men.  but it's news to me that some women are now
> taking it to be offensive to women.

This thread (along with Mark's LL discussion) has now been picked up
by Carol Lloyd's "Broadsheet" column on Salon.com:

http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/?last_story=/mwt/broadsheet/2007/10/29/moist/

An excerpt:

-----
Last week the moist conversation took on a new dimension when Charles
Doyle at the University of Georgia posted to an academic language
list-serve that his use of the word in a Shakespeare class had
prompted several of his female college students to inform him (in an
amused, not outraged way) that the M-word was offensive to women.
According to professor Doyle, the women offered no explanation for the
word's bad juju, but one male student suggested that it might have
something to do with female sexual arousal. To which I offer the
following comment: No, duh.
Since then some posts have suggested that the moist embargo is yet
another feminist absurdity (a theory too absurd to dignify with a
response). But maybe the college students were not talking about the
word per se, but about the professor's use of it. Doyle says he used
the word to describe Egypt in "Antony and Cleopatra" -- and the
association with women's sexual arousal "is not at all beside the
point." So are these women squeamish about Shakespeare's (or Doyle's)
bawdy vision, or do they actually believe the word that has sold Betty
Crocker cake mixes for decades is now an obscenity? Either way, it's
weird to imagine that in this era of happy-go-lucky explicitness, we
could suddenly start getting offended in a college Shakespeare seminar
and turning ordinary words into taboos. Is there a growing
Victorianism lurking in our verbal closet? Or is it that since an open
revulsion with the female body is no longer kosher, our disgust
searches out substitute targets?
-----


--Ben Zimmer

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org