"X's widower"

[Mark Mandel]

>From "Q. Pheevr"'s blog (http://q-pheevr.livejournal.com/53663.html),
quoted by permission:

 Linguistic history is made in Islamabad (and New York)
07 September 2008 @ 17:16

The world has come a long way in the past third of a century or so. In
1975, Robin Lakoff's book Language and Women's Place had the following
to say about widows and widowers:

    Surely a bereaved husband and a bereaved wife are equivalent: they
have both undergone the loss of a mate. But in fact, linguistically at
any rate, this is not true. It is true that we have two words, widow
and widower; but here again, widow is far commoner in use. Widows, not
widowers, have their particular roles in folklore and tradition, and
mourning behavior of particular sorts seems to be expected more
strongly, and for a longer time, of a widow than of a widower. But
there is more than this, as evidenced by the following:

      24.
             1. Mary is John's widow.
             2. *John is Mary's widower.

    Like mistress, widow commonly occurs with a possessive preceding
it, the name of the woman's late husband. Though he is dead, she is
still defined by her relationship to him. But the bereaved husband is
no longer defined in terms of his wife. While she is alive, he is
sometimes defined as Mary's husband (though less often, probably, than
she is as "John's wife"). But once she is gone, her function for him
is over, linguistically speaking anyway.

As of this morning (at the latest), this is no longer true. Here is
today's New York Times reporting on yesterday's election in Pakistan:

    Bhutto's Widower, Viewed as Ally by U.S., Wins the Pakistani
Presidency Handily

    ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of the
assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto who has little
experience in governing, was elected president of Pakistan on Saturday
by a wide margin.

We talk about "sexist language," but, as Lakoff's book made clear,
it's not really the language that is at fault. The sexist asymmetries
in our language merely reflect, and to some extent reinforce, the
sexism that is present in our society. (The words governor and
governess, for example, were once about as parallel semantically as
they are morphologically; that they have drifted apart is merely a
reflection of the fact that society generally assigned men to govern
states, and women to govern children. This pair, I think, is unlikely
to swing back into sync; Sarah Palin is not the governess of Alaska.)

Zardari is described as "Bhutto's widower" for the same reason that so
many women over the centuries have been described as somebody's widow:
because the deceased spouse is more prominent in the speaker's mind
than the surviving one. All it took to make the construction in
Lakoff's (24b) grammatical was the remarkable career of Benazir
Bhutto. If we want to change the language, all we have to do is change
the world.


--
Mark Mandel

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