Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language by Amanda Montell was given to me by my partner because we both enjoy the #podcast Sounds Like a Cult on which Amanda is a host.
I ended up not taking thorough notes all the way through this book. I really want to find a good workflow that lets me take enough notes to remember a book better without sacrificing the fun of reading in pursuit of taking notes. Regardless, I’ve got some notes below!
I think that language in general is really, really neat. Maybe it was comparing Tolkien and Paolini in my youth, but there’s just something so cool about the “why” of words. This book does a great job of diving into all sorts of language history and implications without getting so deep into anything that it becomes a slog to read.
While I wouldn’t recommend this book to just anyone, I think that it was an enjoyable read that helped me see language from a new perspective.
Chapter Zero: Meet Sociolinguistics
The first chapter is an introduction to what #sociolinguistics is, why it matters to the author, and how it relates to #feminism.
On page seven, there’s an excerpt I enjoy about a brief time line of how the English language was born:
In the fifth century AD, a trio of Germanic tribes from Scandinavia called the Angles, the Saxons, and the lutes show up at the British Isles unannounced. Maybe they arrive nicely, maybe they arrive violently; historians aren’t totally sure - but judging by their sharp metal accessories, I’m willing to wager a guess.) These tribes speak a language called Englise, which kind of sounds like a troll language from Lord of the Rings, with lots of rolled r’s, dark vowels, and throaty, phlegmy consonants. This lingo, along with the north Germanic languages spoken by Vikings (who came a few centuries later), pushes Britain’s Celtic languages to the outskirts of the country.
The little bit of Celtic that’s left behind combines with these other guys’ languages to eventually become what we know as Old English (totally incomprehensible today, unless you’re an Old English scholar, in which case, hello and welcome, fellow nerd).
Old English is spoken in Britain until 1066 AD, when the Duke of Normandy (aka William the Conqueror, aka a terrifying little man with a long, gray beard and a fabulous bejeweled crown) invades England, murders a bunch of people, and brings along with him an early form of French. For the few hundred years that follow, there is a sort of linguistic class divide in Britain, where the poor speak English and the rich speak French. But then the black death sweeps through and kills off about a third of the population. This makes the working class way more important to the country’s economy, and by the fourteenth century, English is the dominant language of Britain again But at this point, the language, heavily influenced by French, has evolved into a new form called Middle English (which youse probably seen in the swirly fonts of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales).
A few hundred years go by, and then a linguistic phenomenon known as the Great Vowel Shift begins. Within less than a century, vowels get significantly shorter in fact, they’re still in a process of shortening), es at the ends of words become silent, and the overall sound of the English language changes dramatically. Also by the 1500s, the travel-enabled British have started mingling with loads of different people and languages around the world, and this influences English too. So does the European Renaissance, during which there is a resurgence in the desire for education, a decline of the feudal system, and the invention of new technologies the most important being, with regard to language anyway, the printing press.
The printing press is a big deal, and thanks to this snazzy new ability to mass manufacture newspapers and books, literacy increases; that, in turn, creates a need for a new standard language to print. So spelling and grammar are streamlined, and ultimately, the dialect of London, where most of the publishing business is headquartered, becomes the standard form of English.
According to that standard, the first English dictionary is published in 1604 (it contains only 2,449 words; tor perspective, Webster’s Third New International Unabridged Dictionary, addendum included, boasts a whopping 470,000.
Note that I grabbed all of that using the OCR on my phone’s camera, so excuse any inaccuracies.
The author makes the point that most of the people involved in that story are men, and that as a result things are skewed towards men. That leads to another quote I enjoy:
The link between language and culture is inextricable: language has always been, and continues to be, used to reflect and reinforce power structures and social norms.
The author does tell a story about a woman criticizing her for saying y’all where I really hope they’re putting on a bit about the conversation. Or maybe I’m just a grumpy old man these days?
Chapter One: Slutty Skank Hoes and Nasty Dykes
If you want to insult a woman, call her a prostitute. If you want to insult a man, call him a woman.
Semantic change is the process of how word meanings evolve over time. Pejoration is where a word starts positive and turns negative while the opposite of amelioration. For women, there’s a more typical route:
As Schulz writes, “Again and again in the history of the language, one finds that a perfectly innocent term designating a girl or a woman may begin with totally neutral or even positive connotations, but that gradually it acquires negative implications, at first perhaps only slightly disparaging but after a period of time becoming abusive and ending as a sexual slur.”
The titular word for this chapter, “slut” used to mean something as innocent as an “untidy woman” in Middle English. The word was used for men sometimes, with Chaucer labelling one slovenly male character as sluttish.
When English speakers want to insult a woman, they compare her to one of a few things: a food (tart), an animal (bitch), or a sex worker (slut).
On the subject of why women end up using the same words, both for good and bad:
McConnel-Ginet explains it like this: “The more one talks and the less one listens, the more likely it is that one’s viewpoint will function as if it were community consensus even if it is not.”
Essentially, because men have so much control around the community narrative, the words men use become the words “we” use because men drive “we”. It’s all a male perspective.
what’s really going on is that women happen to be better at a thing called listening.
On the subject of female reclamation of words like bitch and ho, the author says that we have in large part African-American women to thank. African-American Vernacular English (AAVE).
There is some practical advice given on navigating sexist insults.
try to think of something gender neutral to say, choosing to focus on a person’s behavior while verbally slighting them rather than their gender, which is more specific and effective anyway.
Chapter Two: Wait… What Does the Word Woman Mean Anyway?
This chapter opens with the story of Dr. Yvonne Brill’s obituary in the New York Times, which opened with a description of her beef stroganoff — in 2013.
My partner and I have talked more than once about the word “female”, which she has assured me is a derogatory word, or at the least has negative connotation. My stance has always been that I cannot imagine it being a word with negative connotations. Montell agrees with my partner:
In 2015, after Hillary Clinton announced the start of her presidential campaign, political pundits went ber. serk over whether she should (if elected) go by the term”woman president” or “female president.”
This semantic bickering was justifiable, even if most of those reporters didn’t understand exactly why: in practical usage, woman and female are not, in fact, inter-changeable. Our Oxford linguist Deborah Cameron found proof of this in the British National Corpus (a comprehensive database containing over one hundred million written and spoken English words collected from a wide variety of sources. The corpus is meant to serve as a representative sample of late-twentieth-century British English). After scanning the database, Cameron found that when people use female as a noun, as opposed to woman, it’s often in explicitly negative contexts.
I liked this snippet about language changing over time:
This isn’t a unique phenomenon—word meanings inevitably evolve and expand over time. Just as we can’t expect any given culture to stay the same forever, we can’t expect its words to go unchanged either.
Chapter Three: “mm-hmm, girl, you’re right”
This chapter is about how women talk to each other when dudes aren’t around.
On the topic of Trump and Billy Bush’s conversation:
Lewd and misogynist as this language is, the main purpose it serves is as a bonding ritual. As Cameron puts it, “Like the sharing of secrets, the sharing of transgressive (or offensive) words like this is a token of intimacy… It says, ‘I am showing that I trust you by saying things, and using words, that I wouldn’t want the whole world to hear.” And it’s an invitation for the listener to reciprocate. When Trump tells the story about his unsuccessful attempt to have sex with a married woman, the vulnerable confession communicates to Billy Bush that they’re buddies who can rely on one another not to tell. Analytically speaking, Trump is gossiping. At some point or another, all men do (though the content is not always this wholly despicable). It’s simply that the word gossip* and its trivial implications have been pegged a feminine thing.
On the topic of “hedges”, which women may use more than men in conversation. Things like “well I mean” or “sort of”. Journalist Ann Friedman has been accused of using hedging too much, and this is her response:
“Language is not always about making an argument or conveying information in the cleanest, simplest way possible. It’s often about building relationships. It’s about making yourself understood and trying to understand someone else.”