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A brash, enlightening, and wildly entertaining feminist look at gendered language and the way it shapes us, written with humor and playfulness that challenges words and phrases and how we use them. The word bitch conjures many images for many people, but is most often meant to describe an unpleasant woman. Even before its usage to mean a female canine, bitch didn't refer to gender at all-it originated as a gender-neutral word meaning genitalia. A perfectly innocuous word devolving into a female insult is the case for tons more terms, including hussy-which simply meant "housewife"-or slut, which meant "untidy" and was also used to describe men. These words are just a few among history's many English slurs hurled at women. Amanda Montell, feminist linguist and staff features editor at online beauty and health magazine Byrdie.com, deconstructs language-from insults and cursing to grammar and pronunciation patterns-to reveal the ways it has been used for centuries to keep women form gaining equality. Ever wonder why so many people are annoyed when women use the word "like" as a filler? Or why certain gender neutral terms stick and others don't? Or even how linguists have historically discussed women's speech patterns? Wordslut is no stuffy academic study; Montell's irresistible humor shines through, making linguistics not only approachable but both downright hilarious and profound, demonstrated in chapters such as: Slutty Skanks and Nasty Dykes: A Comprehensive List of Gendered Insults Piss Off Bro: Linguists Explain What Locker Room Banter Really Is How to Embarrass the Shit Out of People Who Try to Correct Your Grammar Fuck it: An Ode to Cursing While Female Cyclops, Panty Puppet, Bald Headed Bastard and 100+ Other Things to Call Your Genitalia Montell effortlessly moves between history and popular culture to explore these questions and more. Wordslut gets to the heart of our language, marvels at its elasticity, and sheds much-needed light into the biases that shadow women in our culture and our consciousness.… (más)
Any college or university writing or English course needs to include "Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language" as one of the required texts. It makes one think about the motivations behind people's peculiar linguistic habits, like the use of fillers or hedging.
An in-depth analysis of how words associated with femininity frequently evolve into derogatory terms, while words associated with masculinity use power and authority connotations is given in this insightful piece that explores the evolution of gendered language throughout centuries of human social circles.
The book also examines how gendered language affects the LGBTQIA+ community and looks at how slang and the internet interact to influence linguistic norms.
With a delightfully snarky tone, the book delivers an engaging reading experience that is both enlightening and enjoyable.
I am interested in both gender issues and linguistic geekiness, so this was my kind of book. Thought-provoking, educational and entertaining - and infuriating at times (meaning me do eye rolls at the patriarchy). Highly recommended. ( )
Wordslut by Amanda Montell is a captivating exploration of the intricate relationship between language and societal attitudes towards women. It’s always nice to stumble across an unexpected gem, and finding this book is one such occasion. The cover's striking colour and standout title may have reeled me in, but it was the intriguing subject matter and Montell's accessible writing style which kept me reading.
Far from the radical feminist manifesto I had feared, Wordslut is witty, engaging, and well-researched. Montell displays a particular talent for making complex linguistic concepts comprehensible to a broader audience, challenging readers to contemplate their language use and question societal norms. Montell prompts readers to rethink language not merely as a reflection but as a potent influencer of societal dynamics and attitudes towards women. This book is not a comprehensive treatise on sociolinguistics, but it’s not meant to be. It is an introduction of the topic to the masses, and, in this, it certainly serves its purpose.
Montell delves into some polarising topics, with her take on political correctness, in particular, likely provoking strong reactions, especially among conservatives. Political correctness, she tells us, ‘…does not endanger our freedom of expression at all. The only thing it actually threatens is the notion that we can separate our word choices from our politics – that how we choose to communicate doesn’t say something deeper about who we are…What rubs people the wrong way about political correctness is not that they can’t use certain words anymore, it’s that political neutrality is no longer an option.’ Nevertheless, publishing a book on such topics as those discussed in Wordslut inevitably involves stepping on someone's toes; it's impossible to avoid offense.
A helpful addition to future additions would be the inclusion of a glossary and reference list. Needing to flick back through the book when I forgot an acronym, or qualification was an annoyance, and I often seek out further reading on the topics that interest me. While in-text references are included, an easily accessible list at the back would have been more convenient.
Minor inconveniences aside, Wordslut skilfully navigates the intricate role language plays in shaping our attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours, introducing sociolinguistics to the layperson, and encouraging readers to question social norms and the role of their own linguistic choices in shaping who they are. Whether or not you agree with Montell’s arguments, I encourage you to read what she has to say. ( )
This books is fun, saucy and definitely interesting. Using a sociolinguistic approach, she looks at how women are discriminated against with their use of language (by using hedges, questions, girl talk), how they are more often interrupted, how words used most often assume a male perspective (eg. using "hey guys" as a gender-neutral term). Montell also looks at the binary of grammar which, by default, excludes certain genders and she reviews pronunciations (vocal fry, "gay voice"). She also devotes a chapter to dialects and codes which oppressed people will adopt to create languages that are reflective of their realities. And those are just some of the topics in this rich book. It's a super accessible read, it's humorous, and it includes a lot of examples not only from feminist works, but also from 2SLGBTQ+ and, to a smaller extent, racialized communities.
I've just finished the book and already I'm seeing the assumptions that we make. Upon reading an article this morning on the Plant Mom Aesthetic, I couldn't help notice that the default was female - as though to be nurturing and caring was intrinsically a woman's quality. I guess you have to be a forest ranger to be a male lover of plants . It shows just how the language we use reflects socially accepted points of view. This book will help challenge the words that we use and cast a different perspective on how we all communicate. ( )
A brilliant and so necessary look at how the English language, implicitly or otherwise, under-values, insults, judges or ignores women. A times, it will make you angry; it will also make you laugh. Especially interesting, to me, was how marginalized groups use slang for safety and to build community. The author explores gendered insults, the language of sex and gender, how women talk when men aren't around, and swearing.
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
For B, C, and D. And in loving memory of E.
Primeras palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
When I sat the word bitch, what comes to mind?
Citas
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
In the wrong hands, speech can be used as a weapon. But in the right ones, it can change the world.
…human beings use language as a social tool to do things like create solidarity, form relationships, and assert authority.
We're living in an era when many of us often feel overwhelmed and silenced by the English language.
Perhaps you've heard this feminist riddle: “A young boy was rushed to the hospital from the scene of an accident, where his father was killed, and prepped for emergency surgery. The surgeon walked in, took one look, and said, ‘I can't operate on him – he's my son.' How is this possible?” This scenario trips people up because if the boy's father is dead, how could he be operating on him? Few come to the conclusion that surgeon was in fact his mother. The rare and exotic lady surgeon.
Back in Chaucer's day, the word girl meant a child of any sex. In Old English, pretty meant crafty or cunning. In Middle English, dinner literally mean breakfast.
One of my greatest cultural pet peeves is the belief that watching, playing, and talking about sports are more prestigious and valuable than taking an interest in beauty or fashion. I once worked at a beauty magazine where most of the staff was female but several of the higher-ups were men. It was hard not to notice how tirelessly these guys worked to assert their manliness by making sports references in all their company-wide presentations, only to immediately suggest that they were surely going over our silly female heads. Objectively, there is nothing more complicated or of greater consequence about discussing who won the World Series than there is about discussing who put on the most beautiful show at New York Fashion Week; it's simply that the former is generally a more male-centric endeavor and thus perceived as more important.
Young women use the linguistic features that they do, not as mindless affectations, but as power tools for establishing and strengthening relationships. Vocal fry, uptalk, and even like, are in fact not signs of ditziness, but instead all have a unique history and specific social utility.
[Janet] Holmes's numbers demonstrated that the total number of you knows collected were almost identical between genders, but women used the phrase with a flat pitch, communicating confidence, over 20 percent more than men. And yet, most people don't hear it that way – at the first sign of a woman hedging, they automatically assume insecurity.
…condemning others' grammar is one of the most universally accepted snobberies in Western culture.
…it is highly possible – and sometimes inevitable – for the gender of a word to bleed into speakers' perceptions of what that word means.
In a language that assigns masculinity to the word doctor and femininity to the word nurse, its speakers might subconsciously start to think of those professions in a fundamentally gendered way.
Pronouns aside, there are also some languages that are essentially gender-free, containing very few words that make reference to a person's “natural” gender at all. Yoruba, a language spoken in Nigeria, has neither gendered pronouns nor the dozens of gendered nouns we have in English, including son, daughter, host, hostess, hero, heroine, etc. Instead, the most important distinction in Yoruba is the age of the person you're talking about. So, instead of saying brother and sister, you would say older sibling and younger sibling, or egbun and aburo. The only Yoruba words that make reference to a person's gender (or sex, as it were) are obirin and okorin, meaning “one who has a vagina” and “one who has a penis.” So if you really wanted to call someone your sister, you would have to say egbon mi obirin, or “my older sibling, the one with the vagina.” When you get that specific, it makes our English obsession with immediately identifying people's sexes seem just plain creepy.
…what these metaphors of women as nature, territories, and technologies do is place feminine gender in that same distant category of “other.” According to [Suzanne] Romaine, by comparing her to things like storms and seas, “woman is symbolic of the conflict between nature and civilization, tempting men with her beauty, attracting men with her charms, but dangerous and therefore in need of conquest.” Woman is a continent to colonize, a fortress to siege. These sentiments are reflected not only in English; in languages all over the world, from Italian to Thai, a nation's government is labelled as having “founding fathers,” while the land itself (“Mother Nature,” “virgin territory”) is perceived as a feminine entity. In grammar as in allegory as in life, women are considered reckless places outside the civilized male world – wild things meant to be tamed into the weak, delicate flowers we've traditionally wanted women to be.
“Hitler wasn't any less fascist because he could write a coherent sentence.” [Deborah Cameron].
“Language pedantry is snobbery and snobbery is prejudice,” [Deborah] Cameron says. “And that IMHO, s nothing to be proud of.”
…political correctness does not endanger our freedom of expression at all. The only thing it actually threatens is the notion that we can separate our word choices from our politics – that how we choose to communicate doesn't say something deeper about who we are. As American English speakers, we are perfectly at liberty to use whatever language we want; we just have to know that our words reveal our social and moral beliefs to some extent… What rubs people the wrong way about political correctness is not that they can't use certain words anymore, it's that political neutrality is no longer an option.
I think the golden rule for men should be: If you're a man, don't say anything to a woman on the street that you wouldn't want a man saying to you in prison.”
Here's one of my favorite cursing facts from Phonology 101: swears are the only types of English words that you can use as an infix.
Perhaps the most conspicuous one [pattern] he [Jonathon Green] found was how consistent, and how unsettling, the themes of our genitalia words have remained over time. As green told reporters shortly after his study was published, “The penis is often going to be some kid of weapon, the vagina some kind of narrow passage, intercourse some way of saying ‘man hits woman.'”
“Overall it's really clear that the way we talk about genitals is a super concentrated representation of how we thing about sex and gender,” he [Lal Zimman] tells me. “The research that people have done on heteronormative gender naming really shows that our worst cultural values are reflected in the ways we talk about genitals. Like penises are always weapons that exist for penetrating, sex is always violence, and women and vaginas are passive and absence, just a place to put a penis.”
Just think of some of the most common verbs used to illustrate sex: bone, drill, screw. In the world of these words, the person with the erection is both the star and the narrator. If one were to describe sex from the vagina's standpoint – to say something like, “We enveloped all night,” or “I sheathed the living daylights out of him,” or “we clitsmashed” – it would be such an exceptional rebellion against mainstream sex talk that to many listeners, it would be a real head-scratcher. (257)
At the time I am writing this, one of the definitions of vagina from TheFreeDictionary.com's medical glossary reads, “An organ of copulation that receives the penis during sexual intercourse.” This is not a political view of the vagina, it's a medical one. And yet, I would invite a doctor to try telling a lesbian that her vagina is “an organ that receives the penis.” See how well that goes.
The on-screen depiction of oral sex performed on women has consistently earned movies an NC-17 rating – Blue Valentine, Boys Don't Cry, and Charlie Countryman are a few that come to mind. The same standard has certainly not been applied to on-screen blow jobs. I often think of 2013s Lovelace, a biopic about the star of the 1972 porn film Deep Throat. This was an entire movie dedicated to fellatio, and to extreme sexual violence, and even that was given a mild R. Sure, let the kids watch a porn star get repeatedly raped, but female desire? No, no, no.
“Anytime language reform happens, it has to happen in the context of social change,” he [Lal Zimmerman] says. “You can't have just the linguistic change first and then expect people to get on board with the cultural stuff.”
Últimas palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
A brash, enlightening, and wildly entertaining feminist look at gendered language and the way it shapes us, written with humor and playfulness that challenges words and phrases and how we use them. The word bitch conjures many images for many people, but is most often meant to describe an unpleasant woman. Even before its usage to mean a female canine, bitch didn't refer to gender at all-it originated as a gender-neutral word meaning genitalia. A perfectly innocuous word devolving into a female insult is the case for tons more terms, including hussy-which simply meant "housewife"-or slut, which meant "untidy" and was also used to describe men. These words are just a few among history's many English slurs hurled at women. Amanda Montell, feminist linguist and staff features editor at online beauty and health magazine Byrdie.com, deconstructs language-from insults and cursing to grammar and pronunciation patterns-to reveal the ways it has been used for centuries to keep women form gaining equality. Ever wonder why so many people are annoyed when women use the word "like" as a filler? Or why certain gender neutral terms stick and others don't? Or even how linguists have historically discussed women's speech patterns? Wordslut is no stuffy academic study; Montell's irresistible humor shines through, making linguistics not only approachable but both downright hilarious and profound, demonstrated in chapters such as: Slutty Skanks and Nasty Dykes: A Comprehensive List of Gendered Insults Piss Off Bro: Linguists Explain What Locker Room Banter Really Is How to Embarrass the Shit Out of People Who Try to Correct Your Grammar Fuck it: An Ode to Cursing While Female Cyclops, Panty Puppet, Bald Headed Bastard and 100+ Other Things to Call Your Genitalia Montell effortlessly moves between history and popular culture to explore these questions and more. Wordslut gets to the heart of our language, marvels at its elasticity, and sheds much-needed light into the biases that shadow women in our culture and our consciousness.
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An in-depth analysis of how words associated with femininity frequently evolve into derogatory terms, while words associated with masculinity use power and authority connotations is given in this insightful piece that explores the evolution of gendered language throughout centuries of human social circles.
The book also examines how gendered language affects the LGBTQIA+ community and looks at how slang and the internet interact to influence linguistic norms.
With a delightfully snarky tone, the book delivers an engaging reading experience that is both enlightening and enjoyable.