Subject: cetacean sexism

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 10:43 AM, Amy West <medievalist at w-sts.com> wrote:
>
> From: Jonathan Lighter<wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> >
> > A viewing of John Huston's vastly underrated film of_Moby Dick_  (1956)
> > raises the question of why whales should be generically female.  Even when
> > it's pretty sure to be Moby, the lookout cries "There she blows!"
> >
> > I don't know what they say in Japanese or Norwegian (probably something like
> > "I have a sonar contact"), but this familiar English usage seems not to have
> > been commented on.
>
> Good question!
>
> The OE word, hwael is masculine, so that's not the answer. Is it simply
> extending the ship gender usage? And I just recently learned that that
> usage is comparatively recent (1700s) (did I learn that here?).

Google Books has the whaler's "There she blows" from 1815, FWIW.

http://books.google.com/books?id=MWIEAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA156

(From a piece entitled "The Manner of Taking the Whale" that uses
"she/her" as the cetacean pronoun throughout.)


--Ben Zimmer

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