"X's widower"

[David Bowie]

From:    Mark Mandel <thnidu at GMAIL.COM>

> 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:

Whenever i assign this article for one of my classes, i make it a point
to discuss afterward that this article reflected (as Lakoff herself
points out) the norms of a very narrow slice of the US populace, and it
was also subject (as Lakoff doesn't point out) to issues of confirmation
bias as she collected the examples.

I think she was largely right in this observation (though i wasn't
really observing social norms like this at the time), FWIW, but it
worries me when people refer to "Language and Woman's Place" as if it
were an exhaustive study of USmerican sexism in language in the early 70s.

<snip>

--
David Bowie                               University of Central Florida
     Jeanne's Two Laws of Chocolate: If there is no chocolate in the
     house, there is too little; some must be purchased. If there is
     chocolate in the house, there is too much; it must be consumed.

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