Words and the Woman

SIMON, JOHN

CultureWatching WORDS AND THE WOMAN BY JOHN SIMON How dare men call it "hysterectomy" when they can't even have it, wonders my friend Steele Commager; it should be changed to "hersterec-tomy."...

...Or, to avoid clumsy coinages, you could revert to the older English usage, when every woman, married or not, was a "Mrs.," pronounced mistress, without any unseemly overtones...
...I mean a one-word term for human being—like the German Mensch or Hungarian ember—that does not, as in the case of "man," also mean the male of the species, for which the German has Mann and the Hungarian jerfi...
...To bring in "lady" is to try to confer a social or moral significance that, for better or worse, does not come automatically with a selling job, even at the most exclusive boutique...
...But a spokesperson...
...Thus we get the ghastly neologism "Ms...
...As the pattern of marriage changes, men will approach women much more freely regardless of anybody's marital status, and so, too, will women approach men...
...If there is no word "whitess," "Christianess" or "Protestantess," it was argued, why should these other feminines exist...
...This will have to include very considerable changes in our way of living, but not in our way of speaking...
...One could compromise with "everyone will do the best everyone can," but that is long-winded...
...more often it is a campaign to upgrade the status of certain professions: undertakers becoming morticians and then rising still more vertiginously into funeral directors...
...I asked whether she would have considered "duchess" equally bad...
...Some marriages will be quite open, others will not...
...To be a boy or girl of 20 is a perfectly good and necessary thing, carrying with it joys, beauties and privileges that manhood and womanhood cannot provide, whatever other ones they do bring with them...
...There are two ways of contending with this inequity...
...A "saleslady" is presumed to be more refined than a mere saleswoman...
...So, too, by switching genders, all kinds of piquant or poignant overtones can be added to the words of love...
...Once more, the most practical course would be to shift our endeavors away from language...
...in terms of associations, that is not a good one...
...After puberty, one becomes, allegedly, a woman...
...only the condition should not be perfunctorily appended to her title...
...How nice it would be if English, like other languages, had regular feminine forms or endings...
...There is one unisex word, however, whose absence from English I deeply regret, although English is by no means the only language lacking it...
...it is absurd for lavatories to be labeled "Gentlemen" and "Ladies" as if the particular establishment catered to individuals so superior that they are capable of investing their very bodily functions with a cloacal superiority...
...or even, in one unfortunate case, "Human being...
...He hurls at her, from his despair, the single word "Mensch...
...an estate of which they seem to want no part...
...When will people learn that there is no shortcut to knowing another individual...
...In Space: The Scrapbook of My Divorce, the pseudonymous Jan Fuller writes: "To separate people according to marital status is as offensive and fallacious to me as to separate people according to race, religion, or astrological sign...
...She sputtered a bit, and ended up asserting, somewhat shakily, that one can refer to women on the stage as actors...
...of a fellow critic...
...The word "girl" is needed for much broader uses—as in the sentence from Louise Bogan's review of a collection of poems by Edna Millay, where she speaks of "Miss Millay's successful passage from the emotions and point of view of a rebellious girl to those of a maturely contemplative woman...
...Apropos lady, on the toilet we are all stripped to essential Man and Woman...
...Other languages leave room, both in literature and in life, for that heady moment when a "you" becomes a "thou...
...And what of literature...
...No go...
...Can you really say "Humans must love one another...
...Take the pressure, again long before Women's Lib, to drop feminine suffixes...
...One can, however, be that fanatical and filled with hate for a mere, harmless syllable...
...Most vociferous was the girl friend (or must I say "woman" or "lady friend," "girl" being now construed as sexist condescension...
...Are they not discriminatory bestializations, as in "tigress" and "lioness...
...Where the words of the English language are concerned, vive la difference...
...Nonsense...
...It implies that women poets who sound like women are, therefore, inferior to women poets who sound masculine, or at least indeterminate, and who alone deserve the transex-ual title Poet...
...Actress" is as good as "actor" in anybody's book...
...Negress" and "Jewess" came to be seen as pejoratives?products not of sexism but of racism...
...Miss" and "girl," as betraying a female's unmarried estate, are held to be discriminatory, inasmuch as "Mr...
...only if there were a "jackaless," an "apess" or a "donkeyess" would there be just cause for worry...
...If "Jew" elicits prejudicial attitudes, "Israelite" isn't going to produce better thoughts and feelings...
...If there is a real linguistic problem anywhere, it lies in pronouns...
...will survive...
...There remains the thorny question of words denoting married or single status...
...Yet there is nothing dishonorable about being a saleswoman, a woman who sells things...
...Consider that shattering moment in Biich-ner's Woyzeck, when the wretched protagonist finds that Marie, the one being he loved and was loved by, has been unfaithful to him...
...You could institute separate appellations for married and unmarried men—a difficult undertaking, both because women would find it hard to impose them on men, and because no traditional terms readily present themselves...
...Now that seems very wrong to me...
...does not even achieve what most militant feminists want: total equality with men...
...by a few polite words people will be able to make very clear what they do or do not want from one another...
...won't do either...
...It is pleasant to know immediately that Rossini's L'ltaliana in Algieri concerns the adventures of a woman in Algiers...
...The blacks pushed for the use of "black" over "Negro" even though the two mean the same thing, presumably because "Negro" sounded, or could sound in some mouths, too much like the hated "nigger...
...Why should girls of that age, even granted a certain precocity, be women...
...Frequently the suffix is purely, innocently descriptive: Waitress, shepherdess, actress, stewardess, etc., cannot possibly be construed as pejoratives...
...Women might logically resent a construction like "everyone will do his best," as if a woman involved would not do her best...
...So we get words like goddess, sorceress, prophetess, priestess, princess, duchess, and also poetess, to which last I shall return...
...Well, what about the other -esses...
...To try to convert the adjective "human" into a noun strikes me as impracticable...
...Granted, changes in language, or attempted changes, predate radical feminism...
...If there were any doubt about the noun, the modifier, surely, made the positive intent manifest...
...Yet the profound pathos lies in the fact that, quite inadvertently, Woyzeck has brought his beloved's very humanity into question —which is why "Woman...
...It is a dreadful lack, but we must live with it...
...At that rate, why not "earthlings...
...In "Prayer Before Birth," Louis Mac-Neice's unborn human being exclaims: "I am not yet born...
...As I have already suggested, some words are spuriously assigned an elevating power...
...That can be accomplished only by adopting "Mr...
...On the other hand, if we can overcome prejudice, we can improve the language, too: "Poetess" is a better word than "woman poet" —shorter, with the sharpness and elegance that the one-word term has above the two-word circumlocution, and more euphonious...
...for women as well...
...There was only one written protest, but much oral invective...
...Pronounced, it sounds merely like an illiterate Southerner's way of saying "Mrs...
...The critic then commented that if he thought poorly of Plath, he, too, would call her a poetess...
...One can hardly be that ignorant...
...Ever since Sappho and Erinna, women have done splendidly in poetry, whether their verse was manifestly feminine or not, and if there have been fewer great poetesses than great poets, it is simply because social, educational and economic factors worked against women...
...It was, for example, stupid enough to let "thou" yield to an all-purpose "you...
...In several instances, I suppose, it was a matter of numbers: There just weren't enough women painters in the formative period of the language...
...I would say that they came into being not out of contempt, but to designate the female form of a rare, mysterious, exotic, possibly enviable, sometimes frightening, in other cases exalted or awesome, being...
...In English this intimacy, often nothing short of rapture, cannot be conveyed, except, feebly, by the switch to first names...
...that, let's say, the king who had an amant was homosexual, whereas the one who had an amante was not...
...There is, after all, an illiterate pseudograndeur about the indiscriminate use of "person," as in "A person has to be careful," when the speaker means "One has to be careful" or merely "I have to be careful...
...Several years ago, Robert Brustein got piles of hate mail for referring, in the New Republic, to the actress Gloria Foster as "a powerful Negress...
...I guess there is no getting around the fact that "Miss" is supposed to alert men to a woman's potential availability, while the word "Mr...
...Some men will lie, but nothing has prevented some women from doing the same...
...That was irrelevant, she said, presumably because we have no duchesses here...
...Recently, in New York magazine, I identified Sylvia Plath as a "poetess...
...proclaims the very femininity usages like "spokesperson" and "chairperson" are supposed to make disappear...
...But, then, for all its riches English is regrettably deficient in some ways...
...How about "waitress...
...Instead of leveling and flattening and equalizing words, we should learn to respect differences and similarities in the sexes...
...The allusion is, of course, to those extreme Women's Libbers who have revised the male chauvinist word "history" into the liberated "herstory...
...Ironically, the social upgrading of the suffix -woman into the suffix -lady runs counter to the feminist upgrading of, say, "salesgirl" into "saleswoman," where "woman" is perceived as the right thing to be...
...How about "actress," timidly queried her boy friend ("man friend...
...forgive me/ For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words/ When they speak me . . ." Unfortunately, changing our words will not prevent them from speaking us...
...Naturally, a saleswoman can be a lady just as much as the Queen or the President's wife (not "lady...
...Perhaps the best solution is to stick with the words in use, and simply change our etiquette, so that it is considered polite behavior for a woman to inquire routinely after a man's marital status upon being introduced to him...
...It is questionable, in any case, how long the implications of "Miss" and "Mrs...
...In many cases, though, it must have been precisely discrimination against women that denied their activity in a field the honor of a special word...
...Yet "everyone will do their best" is clearly ungrammatical, and "everyone will do his or her best" is awkward...
...garbage collectors ascending into sanitation engineers...
...Yet no boy of 17 is considered a man...
...It should be possible for us to avail ourselves of a simple, single, all-sex and all-purpose word to denote and connote basic indivisible humanity...
...Today, moreover, the numerical gap between poets and poetesses is rapidly being closed...
...but whether out of bleeding-heart liberalism or out of obscure sexual cravings and guilt feelings (probably exacerbated by the epithet), the hate letters from whites poured in...
...Some words, because of the number and nature of their syllables, may have sounded cacophonous in the feminine...
...If it is glorious to be a woman (which I do not for a moment dispute), why be ashamed of being a chairwoman or spokeswoman...
...what would be insulting, in fact, would be a reference to, say, Anne Bancroft as a "fine actor...
...It is clearly too late in the game to try to change the language by adding new feminine endings, yet that is no reason for not making the most of old and established ones...
...But, I dare say, it would be hard to induce an extreme feminist or a lesbian to settle for a title that today carries implications of marriage (at least when written "Mrs...
...Hence we get "salesperson," "chairperson" and "spokesperson," among other uneuphonious verbal eunuchs...
...at Marie...
...And, again, "I like 'Ms.' and use it in all my correspondence...
...And "Ms...
...English translators have tried to render this with "Whore...
...And so, too, women may have to accept the lack of an acceptable word for "Ms...
...Nor is such verbal reform confined to minorities in pursuit of their human dignity...
...Yet whatever one's feelings about the latter kind of euphemism that often lapses into euphuism may be, other kinds of tampering can scarcely be viewed without concern...
...or "You...
...This supposed analogy can be easily refuted: Both the lion and the tiger are aristocratic, indeed royal, animals...
...Because it is not even a proper monosyllable, but a vowelless abortion, cacophonous and un-English...
...will neither encourage nor discourage anybody, and may eventually, along with "Mr.," disappear...
...But words, you say, have associations and connotations...
...To "discriminate," to be "discriminating," has a positive connotation too, and a society capable of intelligent discrimination will grant women equal political, social and economic opportunities...
...The word reeks of adjective, and has, as a would-be substantive, a comic ring at best, as when a horse becomes an "equine...
...I can see, though I do not share, objections to a female "spokesman...
...and in a democratic country, where business and social contacts tend to be made on an instantaneous first-name basis, there is very little ritual value left in that...
...Besides, "person" does not fare very well in the connotations game: One thinks of "unauthorized persons" or "persons under 18" not being admitted to important or desirable places...
...The common male assumption is that this is based on etymological ignorance: the notion that the word derives from "his story...
...and "man" make no such disclosures...
...Consider now Women's Lib's insistence on abolishing the term "girl" for anyone but children and adolescents...
...Then change people's minds, not the language...
...The honorifics "Miss" and "Mrs...
...Can you imagine Woyzeck shouting "Human...
...Why do I fuss over this measly monosyllable "Ms...
...allows married men with so-called dishonorable intentions to carry on as though they were still available bachelors...
...Why, then, are there no paintres-ses or Christianesses or Italianesses...
...But the more extreme position wants to remove all sex or gender from words, and turn them all into spayed or gelded neuters...
...Which comes first, you ask, arguing that certain current words and usages preserve, even beget, unworthy feelings and ideas...
...Who cares about waitresses, she declared, no doubt because they rated low on her social scale...

Vol. 57 • April 1974 • No. 7


 
Developed by
Kanda Sofware
  Kanda Software, Inc.