"X's widower"

[Wilson Gray]

Are there many - or any - people still around who learned as I did
that a baby is an "it" and not a "he" or a "she"?

-Wilson

On Sun, Sep 7, 2008 at 10:39 PM, Mark Mandel <thnidu at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Mark Mandel <thnidu at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      "X's widower"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain

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