[Ads-l] "Catfight" goes unisex.

[Benjamin Torbert]

Is that really unisex, or is it "feminizing" Shatner and Nimoy? This seems
to me like pretty close to standard-issue sexist use of feminine lexicon to
put men down.
On Apr 30, 2016 12:48 PM, "Jonathan Lighter" <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      "Catfight" goes unisex.
>
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>
> Radio's "Wait Don't Tell Me!" observes that _Star Trek_ was nearly canceled
> after Season 1 because Shatner and Nimoy "got into a screaming diva
> catfight."
>
> I noted unisex "diva" here some years back.  As for "catfight," I was
> surprised to hear a battalion commander in Michael Ware's documentary _Only
> the Dead See the End of War_ warn his soldiers (in 2004) that they'd
> probably have a "catfight" in (I believe) Fallujah.
>
> In olden days (as my grandparents used to say) a fierce fight might be
> called a "dogfight." The word was applied to aerial free-for-alls  during
> WW1. (My spellchecker wants "frees-for-all.")
>
> Since a "catfight" has usually been an altercation between women, this ex.
> seems notable.
>
> JL
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>
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