"Language and Society" paper

SJ. q 111p

Communicating Gender

Suzanne Romaine Oxford University

LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOCIATES, PUBLISHERS 1999 Mahwah, New Jersey London

I '

CHAPTER

5

What's Name? . In a

Naming is an act of power. In Genesis Adam's first recorded act of domination is naming, assigning the symbol, the act of a I-am-he-who-tells-you-what-or- who-you-are. It is the ultimate gesture of paternalism. The infant child is named. Similarly the first response to the other, to the outsider, is to assign a name. The one who assigns is the insider, the decider, the winner. (Judge Gary Strankman on the occasion of the naming of Ishi Court at the University of California, Berkeley, 1993; cited by Hinton, 1994, p. 155)

In this opening quotation Judge Gary Strankman was commenting on the balance of power in colonial California at a time when the indigenous Indian population became subordinated to the expanding White settlers. There is little question who were the winners, who were the namers, and who were the named. Although not addressing gender specifically, his remarks draw our attention again to the connections between race, gender, and power, and how paternalism has defined women in its own terms as others and outsiders. The names we give to things are not arbitrary. In this chapter I explore the significance of naming. I also show how the intellectual foundations of linguistics based on the principle of arbitrariness of the linguistic sign and theories of markedness have discriminated against women.

NAME CALLING

Do you remember the childhood taunt usually said by one child who has been called a bad name by another, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me"? Names do have the power to hurt

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and abuse, and define us as "others" in relation to some norm. As James Valentine (1995) said about name calling, "names can wrap us up with sticky labels that give us a permanent address on the other side of the tracks." A name assigns us to a group at the same time as it creates a reality in which we have to function.

It is easy to see why women have been especially sensitive to gender differences in naming practices and forms of address because these are a particularly telling indicator of our social status. To answer Shakespeare's question of "what's in a name?" we co uld reply, a person's social place. To be referred to as "the Mrs ." or "the little woman" indicates the inferior status to which men have allocated women. When Yvette Roudy became Minister for Women's Rights in France following a 1983 law making sexual discrimination illegal, she observed that women had not yet won the po- litical right to be titled accurately. Her new ministry's slogan became "Au- jourd'hui Jes metiers n'ont pas du sexe" ('Today occupations have no sex'). She appointed a government commission in 1984 headed by Benoite Groult to "feminize" the names of those jobs that conventionally were masculine in gender, such as professeur, juge, and so on, discussed in chapter 3. She herself wanted to be called Madame la ministre, whereas Edith Cresson during her brief period as Prime Minister used the title Madame le premier ministre.

When Roudy's commission for the feminization of job titles published the results of its work in 1986, it met with indifference and ridicule . One woman journalist asked, "Why create new words when no one is going to use them?" The French language academy, an institution noted for its conservatism and purism, condemned the new words in terms very similar ro those expressed by Calvert Watkins in his "pronoun envy" statement (see chap. 4). The academy said that the commission had misunderstood that grammatical gender was arbitrary and largely independent of natural gender. The feminine was the marked category. For a great many men at least, feminism has been equated with what is perceived as a pointless and at times amusing or irksome insistence on the replacement of titles such as Mrs . and Miss with Ms., and other gender-marked terms, such as chairman, with chairperson or chair, which I examined in the last chapter.

Many articles and cartoons such as the one in Fig. 5 .1 appear in the press about this, and most have a jocular tone to them, suggesting that somehow the proposed gender-neutral terms are ridiculous and preposter- ous. One press item, for instance, had the title " Death of a salesperson," and another, from New Zealand, "Gone like the melting snowperson." When the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) decided to avoid sexist language, The Sun (May 7, 1984) came out with the headline, "ABC plans attack on manhood." The article related how "Aunty is killing off men . . . sportsmen, gentlemen, aldermen, the whole lot." Press releases

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

"Are you the house person who advertised for a cleaning person?"

FIG. 5.1 . Housepersons and cleaning persons .

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on the replacement of sexist religious texts were entitled "Scrubbing t~e scriptures" (Newsweek, 1983, p. 49) and "Tht: Church of our Fathers 1s asked to watch its language" (Judd, 1989). Still others created terms such as o ne uppersonship. One male humorist, Ambrose Bierce, suggested Mush (abbreviated Mh.) as a title for unmarried men (see Baron, 1986, P· 166). However, I have more to say about the question of reform and the use of ridicule to undermine it in chapter 10.

IS IT MISS OR MRS.?

When I first began teaching in Britain, I was puzzled by the_ f~ct that males and females were indicated on student lists by using the m1t1als and last names for the men, whereas women had the title Miss (or Mrs) added_ to their names. When I asked a colleague why this was the case, he replied that it was done so that we would know which students were male and female. He had no answer to my next questions, which were, why_ on a class list was it even necessary to know, or why were the women singled out to have titles indicating their marital status ("nubility titles," as one linguist has put it!). That was simply the way it had alway~ been do~e, and it had never occurred to him that we should abandon this as a sexist

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practice. I cannot count how many times after having given my name over the phone with no title that I was immediately asked, "Is it Miss or Mrs?"

This system of marking females with nubility titles is still used at all levels of society. At the time I was appointed to my chair at Oxford in 1984, there were only 3 women holding the rank of full professor out of a total of more than 200 professors. (There are not many more women in such positions now!) In the diaries printed for academic staff, various other official lists of the university, and the different colleges, the names of men are still given in this way or with a title, followed by a list of degrees and where they were obtained, so that, for instance, a man named John Smith who is professor of modern history would be listed as "]. Smith, M.A., Ph.D. (Edinburgh), Professor of Modern History." I and my women col- leagues were given a title, either Miss or Mrs, rather than simply Professor before our names. The term Ms is still not as widely used in Britain as it is in the United States (where since 1973 it has been sanctioned as an optional title), as can be seen in sporting events such as the Wimbledon tennis matches, where women players such as Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova are referred to as Miss Evert (or latterly Mrs Lloyd after she married), and Miss Navratilova, but men such as Boris Becker are referred to with last name only. The men are also just men, but the women are always ladies. The use of lady as a polite euphemism for woman is far more common in Britain than in the United States, for reasons I discuss later.

As I showed in the previous chapter, the many asymmetries in the ways that women are referred to or addressed reflect differences in power (see chap. 8 for discussion of their impact in rape trials). Nonreciprocity of address to women is a feature of many societies. Javanese women, for instance, use more deferential speech levels to their husbands than they receive in return. There are different Japanese pronouns for I and you, depending on the sex of the speaker. When used by women, the terms represent a greater degree of deference than when used by men. Tradition- ally, only men used the terms boku, ore, wasi, and wagahai to refer to themselves, whereas women used atakusi, atai, and atasi. Now some women have begun to use boku. The forms watakusi and watasi can be used by both men and women, particularly in formal contexts.

To take some examples from Western societies, women teachers in some schools in Italy tend to be addressed as signora (Mrs.) or signorina (Miss), but men receive a title plus their last name. Some women did not regard this as unfair because they thought of signora as a term of respect and valued their role as women more than the role of professional. In one school the headmaster announced a policy specifying that he would address the women by signora or signorina plus last name and the men by their first names. The male teachers could also address him by first name, but women were expected to call him headmaster or Mr. Headmaster.

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Women are also more likely than men to be addressed by their first names. Women often protest that male doctors call them by their first names even on the first consultation. Men, however, are more likely to be addressed by a title plus last name. It would break the conventional rules of address if women were to call their doctors by their first names. Patients are subordinate to doctors, but it seems that female patients are even more so according to Candace West's findings. Doctors interrupt female patients a;d female doctors are interrupted more by male patients than male doctors, which suggests that to be a woman is to be a subordina~e, no m~tter. what professional level she attains. I have more to say about mterruption m the

next chapter. . . . Some feminists recommend that women should begm usmg their male

doctors' first names to draw attention to sexist practices. I recall being somewhat surprised to be addressed by first name in a letter written to me by the senior partner in an accounting firm, whom I had ~ev.er met or spoken to before, even though I was a client of .one of ~he. 1umor female partners. So I wrote back to him and address~d him by .his first name. The use of reciprocal first names in English-speakmg countnes .and. many other places too is indicative of intimacy, familiarity, and sohdanty, whereas nonreciprocal use signals unequal power.

Thus, as I observed in chapter 1, it is not the linguistic forms themselves that discriminate, but the way in which they are used in particular contexts to particular persons. If I call a student by her first name b~t expect and insist on being called Professor in return, it is the asymmetry itself, not t~e particular forms of address, that can be considered discriminatory. In this case however some would argue that the greater seniority in terms of edu~ation and' often age entitles certain professionals to expect those junior to them to use special address terms. In another context, say a ~rofessio~al meeting among colleagues, all might adopt the title professor m referrmg to one another, just as in another, we might all adopt first names. Both would be signs of solidarity and acknowledgment of equality.

LADIES FIRST?

Men have been reluctant to use the simple term woman, which according to some men is too blunt, too overtly sexual, too demeaning, or too com- mon, so polite usage has called for euphemism, the most common be~ng girl or lady. When a male colleague commented to me that he would ~1ke to see "more ladies" in our college at Oxford, he was puzzled and possibly embarrassed when I asked him if he was referring to women. The expression ladies and gentlemen has long been a polite convention (running c~unt~r to the prevailing trend I noted in chap. 2, whereby males come first m

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expressions such as boys and girls, man and wife, etc.), but lady is not simply the polite equivalent of gentleman, as men like to claim when women protest at being called ladies. We can see this from the fact that lady is used in circumstances where gentleman would not be. We say, for example, cleaning lady but not *garbage-gentlemen.

As I was writing this chapter, a headline appeared in the Financial Times (May 12, 1995) declaring "Old Lady bites back." It was referring to in- flation figures higher than the government had projected and action being taken by the Bank of England. What, I wondered, could be thought of as polite in referring to a bank as an "Old Lady"? The fact that the Bank of England has long been known as the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street is another example of the continuing use of the female form to symbolize abstractions, as discussed in chapter 3, as well as the general prejudice against old women, spinsters, old maids, and so on that I noted in chapter 4 (see further in chap. 10 on language as an old lady). In the previous chapter we saw too some of the pejorative associations lady has acquired over the course of its history as it ceased to be used exclusively in reference to a high-ranking woman. This is especially true in the United States, with the exception of the term First Lady to refer to the President's wife. When a woman becomes president of the United States, it will be interesting to see how her husband is referred to. I predict that he will not be called the First Gentleman!

American feminists have paid much more attention to the term lady than their British counterparts. Nessa Wolfson and Joan Manes, for in- stance, give examples to show why lady is not interchangeable with ma'am and is therefore not a term of respect in American English (although in South Africa it is, in interchanges between so-called "colored" and White, where it marks asymmetries of power grounded in racism). The term lady is often uttered sarcastically, as in this exchange they recorded on the telephone between a female caller and a male respondent (Wolfson & Manes, 1980, p. 89):

Mr. Jones? Yes, ma'am? I'm calling for Jim Smith, who's running in the Democratic primary next Tuesday. Yes, ma'am. May I ask what you think of Mr. Smith? I'll tell you lady. I'm voting for Jim Brown. Well, thank you very much. Yes, ma'am.

This contrast between lady and ma'am explains why many women, myself included, do not want to be called ladies. Julia Penelope ( 1990, p.

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36) once told a telephone caller who asked her if she was the "lady of the house" that no ladies lived in her house. The expression lady of the house is not matched by gentleman of the house, but contrasts instead with man of the world, another indication of the linguistic mapping of the division between the public and private spheres onto male and female, respectively. Indeed, the French equivalent of 'woman of the world' (femme du monde) carries the meaning of 'prostitute'. Looking at the British National Corpus, for instance, we find 25 cases of lady of the house, 3 of woman of the house, and none of gentleman of the house, and only 8 of man of the house. By contrast, there are 29 occurrences of man of the world, but only 12 of woman of the world. There are no cases of lady/girl/gentleman/boy· of the world.

In a 1982 speech about the economy, Ronald Reagan blamed the reces- sion on the increase in women in the workforce: "It is the great increase of the people going into the job market, and-ladies, I'm not picking on anyone but ... because of the increase in women who are working today." By pointing the finger at "ladies," while disclaiming that he was "picking on anyone," he drew attention away from his own economic policies. His use of the term lady was a double whammy here. It is polite, in keeping with his claim that he's not "picking on anyone," but it's also intended to suggest that ladies should be ladies of the house and have no place in the workforce. Ladies don't work, unless of course they are doing housework, which is not "real" work, as I noted in chapter 1. Thus, there are no working ladies, only working women.

The idea that a real lady does nothing was part and parcel of the Victorian construction of ladyhood at a time when conduct books spelled out what it was proper for ladies and gentlemen to do. Gentlemen's wives were ladies of leisure, not to be engaged in baking, brewing, and tending the chickens and garden. In commenting on the considerable waste of talent and energy directed toward becoming a lady in this constrained sense, Margaretta Grey noted that "A lady, to be such, must be a mere lady, and nothing else" (Butler, 1894, p. 288). Many writers such as Sarah Ellis (1839, p. 71) observed how deficient was the education given to women with its concentration on manners rather than matter, in show rather than substance, as Lynda Mugglestone (1995, p. 177) put it. Because a woman's object in life was to please men, skills such as dancing, singing, and how to enter and leave a carriage or room were supposed to add to her attrac- tiveness. In the Jamaican novel Lionheart Gal (Sistren with Honor Ford Smith, 1986, pp. 180-181) we find the contrast between the meaning of lady and woman similarly distinguished when a child relates how she used to play at being a market woman with a basket on her head. She stood under her grandmother's window calling out, "Lady, you want anything to buy, Maam?" Her grandmother told her to come inside at once, and

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asked what she was doing. Upon hearing that she was playing the role of market woman, her grandmother reprimanded her. The girl asked what was wrong with "market ladies." Her grandmother replied, "Ladies? They are not ladies. They are women. Go and take a seat in your room."

When the British nation as a whole became more affluent during the Victorian era, with the gap between rich and poor filled in by the middle classes, the term gentleman became a term of social approval and moral approbation; ladies were of the middle class and women of the working class. Female students at Owens College in Manchester, for instance, were divided between ladies (taking a single course, presumably for pleasure only because ladies would not need to do real work) and women, who were registered for examinations, which they needed for career purposes. This suggests at least one reason for the finding that there are no ladies of the world, but only women of the world, and conversely that the woman who stays at home is overwhelmingly referred to as the lady of the house rather than the woman of the house.

It was in this social and historical context that speaking properly acquired its social capital in Victorian England. In a letter to his sister Hannah in 1833, historian Thomas Macaulay (cited in Trevelyan, 1878, p. 338) wrote that "the curse of England is the obstinate determination of the middle classes to make their sons what they call gentlemen." Likewise, Sarah Ellis, a contemporary of Macaulay, commented (1839, p. 107) on the metamor- phosis in the meaning of the social label lady brought about by modern schools:

Amongst the changes introduced by modern taste, it is not the least striking, that all daughters of tradespeople, when sent to school, are no longer girls, but young ladies. The linen-draper whose worthy consort occupies her daily post behind the counter, receives her child from Mrs. Montagu's estab- lishment-a young lady. At the same elegant and expensive seminary, music and Italian are taught to Hannah Smith, whose father deals in Yarmouth herrings; and there is the butcher's daughter, too, perhaps the most ladylike of them all.

What was the elite to do in a modern society when even the daughter of a herring seller could call herself a lady if her father could afford to send her to an elegant and expensive school where she would learn to read and write, and to speak like a lady? Anyone with money, ambition, and the right connections could aspire to be a gentleman or a lady. The daughters of the butcher, the herring seller, and other categories of tradespeople mentioned would all belong today to the upper working class and lower middle class, precisely those levels in the social hierarchy where modern sociolinguistics finds the greatest differentiation in male and female speech (see chap. 6).

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The term girl was also used during the late Victorian period to refer to adult women, as is clear in the title of the "Hammersmith Sculling Club for Girls and Men," set up in 1896 and concerned only with "working girls." Without a father who could support her or a husband who could elevate her status to that of lady, working women had only domestic service, governessing, or prostitution as a livelihood.

Not surprisingly, many women feel that lady cannot be reclaimed. Women are so degraded and demeaned that even the polite euphemism and aristocratic title of lady does not confer dignity on women. The his- torical association of the terms woman and lady with different social classes may be partly behind the greater and more positive use of the term lady today in British English. Deborah Cameron (1995, p. 46), however, reported that Today newspaper, a down-market publication, has now banned the word lady, designating it as a "coy genteelism."

What then do women want to be called? Alerte Hill (1986) recalled being in a restaurant where a waitress addressed her husband as "sir" and her as "dear." Nessa Wolfson and Joan Manes (1980) discussed this pattern of address in more detail. In their study of 800 service encounters, they found that women were most commonly addressed as dear, ma'am, or nothing. Terms such as honey, dear, babe, doll, and so on are often called terms of endearment and function as such between equals and intimates, but when used by strangers, they have other connotations, such as conde- scension and irritation, similar to the example of lady cited earlier. Women and children are called dear, babe, doll, and hon more often than men, indicating the connection between the use of such terms and subordination. Babe and doll when used as female address terms also equate women with children. Consider this telephone conversation initiated by a female caller to a -doctor's office (Wolfson & Manes, 1980, p. 88).

Does the doctor have office hours tonight? Yes he does. He has hours from 7 p.m. From 7 until when? From 7 until he's done, hon.

Shere Hite, author of a U.S. national survey on sexuality and relationships, was rumored to have punched a cab driver for calling her "dear."

Judith Martin, author of the popular U.S. newspaper column "Miss Manners," has attempted to reclaim the word madam as a title and term of address for women. In a column on the subject she suggested that it is a "solid-sounding word, unaffected by the office holder's marital status" and therefore appropriate as an equivalent title to Mr. in combination with certain job titles, such as Mr. or Madam Vice President, or for addressing a person whom one does not know (instead of Miss, or Lady). She pointed

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out too that its abbreviated form ma'am is the correct form for addressing the Queen of England. In concluding her case, she reminded men that "'Madam,' gentlemen, is no longer funny." She added, "We are not going to lose this very proper term because of anybody's improper thoughts, the way we lost the once useful and respectable title 'Mistress.'" Madam is actually the most commonly used form of address for women in Britain, where it is the female equivalent to sir, though the first women officers admitted to the elite Sandhurst military academy were addressed as sir and not madam. The term mistress too, as I noted in the last chapter, has a wider usage in Britain, where it serves as a title for a female head of school (e.g., headmistress), or female school teacher (see chap. 10).

MARKED WOMEN

In the last chapter I looked at some "marked women" in the category of mothers. More examples show us that women are more generally marked. Consider, for instance, expressions such as lady/woman/female doctor. It is assumed that a doctor is a man, so a woman who is a doctor must somehow be marked as such, which conveys the idea that she is not the "real" thing. In the British National Corpus, for instance, I found the following usages: lady doctor (125 times), woman doctor (20 times), female doctor (10 times), compared to male doctor (14 times). There were no occurrences of gentlemen doctor and only one case of man doctor. The fact that housekeeping is a female occupation is explicitly marked in char- woman and cleaning lady, but implicit in housekeeper, and in the short form char, as well, which is assumed to be female. There are no * charmen or *cleaning men/gentlemen/boys. A "cleaning man" is a janitor/care- taker/custodian/superintendent (depending on your variety of English). However, the common British English usage cleaner is gender neutral. Likewise, we have midwives and parlor girls, but no *midhusbands, no *parlor boys, and so on.

When we look at data from the British National Corpus, we can see, as I noted earlier in this chapter, that the preferred term for a woman who cleans is cleaning lady (30 occurrences), followed by cleaning woman (23 occurrences), and cleaning girl (l occurrence). There was also one case of lady cleaner. The combination charwoman (17 occurrences), however, is preferred over the term charlady (9 occurrences). There are no occurrences of chargirl.

Conversely, we have terms such as male nurse (or male midwife), where the male has to be marked because the norm is assumed to be female. The British National Corpus has 20 instances of male nurse and only 1 of female nurse. Compare also widow and widower, where the male member

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is marked with the suffix -er, presumably because women generally outlive men, thus making the man who survives his spouse less common than a woman who survives hers. It would be interesting to look at languages spoken in cultures where circumstances are different. The only other case I am aware of in English where the male term is the marked one is that of bridegroom, where bride is the basic term.

Similarly, we have the career woman (or even career girl, as I heard Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, referred to on the BBC news in 1992), but not the career man. Men by definition have careers, but women who do so must be marked as deviant. A man can also be a family man, but it would be odd to call a woman a family woman. Women are by definition family women. We can check my intuitions against the British National Corpus, where the expression family man occurs 94 times, and the corresponding family woman 4 times. Similarly, career woman occurs 48 times, career girl 10 times, and career lady once, but career man only 6 times, and career boy or career gentleman not at all. Expressions such as career woman/lady/girl count as two strikes against women. On the one hand, they suggest that as women, females can't be real professionals, and on the other, they suggest that as professionals, females can't be real women, unless, of course, they are prostitutes! Not surprisingly, the term business girl used to be a slang term for a prostitute. When Alma Graham was called "the leading lady of lexicography," she pointed out that the label implied she was playing a role and not doing the job of a bona fide professional.

In my college at Oxford, which was formerly all male, I have often been referred to as the college's "lady professor." An American colleague once reported to me that when he had tried to reach me on the telephone, the college porter had told him he believed the "good lady" was having lunch. Even after I became the college's first woman fellow, it was and still is common for speakers at college meetings to begin their remarks by saying, "Gentlemen." I routinely received announcements about events such as the annual fellows' wives dinner (since abolished!) asking me to indicate if I would be bringing my wife. I cannot count how many times when I was present among the still primarily male gatherings at my college that it was assumed I was either someone's wife or a junior research fellow. These incidents show the effects of what Julia Penelope referred to as PUD (pa- triarchal universe of discourse). Not surprisingly, a lady fellow who is also a professor is marked by her presence in a context where all fellows are assumed literally to be fellows.

At times I have felt as if Beatrix Walsh were writing about the present status of women at the university when she wrote of her time there in 1932 when she matriculated at St. Hilda's College, Oxford. On the issue of the standing of women dons within the university she noted that "it was not

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allowed to be great." Men accorded a similar lack of status to the newly admitted women undergraduates and the newly established women's col- leges. Walsh (1993, pp. 10-11) wrote that "almost all the men, senior or junior, had difficulty in concealing the curled lip which sometimes asserted itself despite the universal politeness." She then related how she received many invitations sent to her by a history student, all addressed to her at St. Hilda's Hall. When she pointed out to him that St. Hilda's had the status of college, he replied, "You're not really a college, are you? I mean, your Principal couldn't really be Vice-Chancellor, could she?" Walsh also reported that the male dons were also "exquisitely polite," although some hid behind it as a shield for their contempt and refused to take women students .in their lectures and tutorials. One claimed that Greek Comedy was too obscene for "girls." As a linguist, I found it interesting that in looking back on her experience, Walsh was struck by how her treatment and that of other women had been obscured by politeness-as she put it, "the really seductive politeness. There is a lot to be said for it, both as treatment and as weapon" (see chap. 6 for further discussion of the politics of politeness).

It is also due to what Penelope calls PUD that any woman at home during the day is assumed to be a housewife or lady of the house. On occasions when I have been the only person in the English Faculty Office, people coming in have assumed I was the secretary because any female sitting in an office must be a secretary. One day a call was put through to me at Merton College from a man who wanted information about doing a degree in Teaching English as a Foreign Language at Oxford. After much discussion and my repeated insistence that we didn't have such degrees, he wanted to know if it was possible to "speak to the professor himself." I told him he was speaking "to the professor herself." He assumed that there must be some male professor of greater authority to whom he could appeal.

We have seen then in these and other examples how the prevailing world view assumes that everyone is male unless otherwise designated. The use of the nearly obsolete convention of referring to women as "the sex" in British English illustrates Monique Wittig's contention that men have ap- propriated the universal, while women bear the mark of gender. Because markedness is essentially an asymmetrical and hierarchical relationship be- tween the poles of an opposition, the marked term always conveys a more narrow meaning. We can see this in the advice given by one Victorian commentator writing in 1856, who noted the different standards of behavior expected of gentlemen and ladies (whom he refers to as "the sex"):

A young man may talk recklessly of 'lots of bargains', 'lots of money', 'lots of fellows', 'lots of fun' etc., but a lady may not. Men may indulge in any latitude of expression within the bounds of sense and decorum, but woman

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has a narrower range-even her mirth must be subjected to the rules of good taste. It may be naive, but must never be grotesque. It is not that we would have primness in the sex, but we would have refinement. Women are the purer and the more ornamental part of life, and when they degenerate, the Poetry of Life is gone. (cited in Bailey, 1991, p. 259)

We can see how language was imbued with the similar sort of subtleties of social meaning, as was every item of a woman's clothing. Davidoff (1973, p. 93 ), for example, noted how "every cap, bow, streamer, ruffle, fringe, bustle, glove and other elaboration symbolized some st7.tu:, categ?ry of the female wearer." One could add to this list, her every h. Talkmg properly was very much like putting on the right s:i~t ~f clothing and makeup, or having gloves that fit. The process of cod1ficat10n of standard English by male grammarians and dictionary makers, which I discussed in the last chapter, is in effect an allegory of Pygmalion's carving of a statue of a beautiful young woman. Although grammars were made by men, they were carved in woman's image. Grammar is language tamed and made perfect. L&e the idealized female form, grammar is glamorous (see further in chap. 6).

As Tannen (1994b, chap. 4) correctly observed, there is no unmarked woman today either. Everything about a woman's choice of clothing,. be- havior and so on carries additional meanings. The range of style options for w~men is far wider than for men. Women have to choose among skirts, slacks or dresses. Women have to choose between shoes that are comfort- able ;nd shoes that are attractive. If her clothes are tight or revealing, it sends a message of wanting to be attractive, which may be interpreted as "asking for it" (see chap. 8). If her clothes are not sexy, that too sends a message. Similarly, heavy makeup calls attention to the wearer, whereas no makeup is anything but unmarked. Some men even see it as a deliberate and hostile refusal to please. Thus, the choices open to women are generally forced choices between alternatives that send messages they may not want to send. In filling out forms that require them to give titles, men have only one choice, Mr., which is unmarked for anything but maleness. Women nowadays often have a choice of three, Mrs./Miss/Ms., all of which are marked and therefore·-say something about a woman beyond the fact that she is female. This shows how complex the issue of reform is because the adding of a term such as Ms. to the system means that the other terms Miss and Mrs. undergo shifts in meaning (see chap. 10).

Women's markedness is manifested not only in these various ways in language and dress, but also in models of linguistic analysis, some of which incorporate formal notions of markedness. Some analyses, such as the one offered in a widely used introductory textbook on semantics, assume male- ness is the more basic and positive semantic category and that females are therefore to be described as [-male]. This is another example where people

134 CHAPTER 5

are divided into two categories, male and nonmale, with the masculine term functioning as both the positive and neutral member of the opposition. The female term denotes not just the opposite, but can only be used nega- tively. Thus, if we were to break down nouns such as man and woman, boy and girl, into their semantic building blocks, we would analyze them as follows. All the terms share the feature of [animacy], which distinguishes them from inanimate objects such as tables and chairs, and the words boy and girl are distinguished from man and woman in terms of both sex as well as age. We also need the feature [human] to distinguish between human beings and other animate beings such as cats and dogs, which would be marked for [-human]. Again, we see a bias expressed in the distinction [-human] and [-adult], which suggests that the adult human life form or state is more basic, and that children are in a sense regarded as deficient adults, whereas animals are not on a par with humans. One could of course argue precisely the opposite from a biological point of view because all adults were once children, and pushing the argument further, humans are evolutionarily later life forms than animals.

Although such a feature analysis shown in Table 5.1 may seem elegant because it captures a number of semantic contrasts with a minimum of binary features, it is sexist and one can easily see that the cards are stacked against women, who have one negative feature, and little girls, who have two strikes against them. Is it surprising that grown women have objected to being called "girls"? (For a male counterargument, see chap. 10.) Deb- orah Cameron (1985) used this example to illustrate how the practices of linguists are implicated in patriarchal ideology and oppression.

The annoyance women feel at being called girls was made clear in a full-page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal entitled "Let's get rid of 'The Girl'" (August 28-September 22, 1978). One of the important con- nections Erving Goffman (1976) drew attention to is how gender is dis- played and portrayed in advertising with the repeated imagery of women posed as children (see chap. 9).

There are other technical problems with this analysis that arise from the subordinate status of women. The feature [adult] does not adequately dis- tinguish the meanings of girl and woman because the term girl is often applied to adult females. Speakers should find this next sentence nonsen-

Man

[+animate] [+human] [+adult) [+male]

TABLE 5.1 Semantic Feature Analysis of Man, Woman, Boy, and Girl

Woman

[+animate] [+human] [+adult] [-male]

Boy

[+animate] [+human] [-adult] [+male]

Girl

[+animate] [+human) [-adult] [-male]

WHAT'S IN A NAME? 135

sical, but in fact do not: "Practically no adults were using it [a reformed number system in Norway SR], including the girls in the telephone ex- change, and schoolchildren appeared to drop it when they became adults" (Haugen, 1966, p. 188). Here the author's use of including makes it clear that "the girls at the telephone exchange" are adult females, who are contrasted with "schoolchildren," who are not adults.

Linguist John Lyons (1977, p. 334) remarked as follows on the unequal status between the terms girl and woman with respect to boy and man, which should make a phrase such as "girls at the telephone exchange" a logical contradiction:

By any of the most obvious criteria (sexual maturity, etc.) girls reach what would normally be described as adulthood earlier, rather than later than, boys; and yet they ~re described as girls far longer than boys are described as boys. The proposition "X is now a man" may well imply "X is no longer a boy"; but "Xis now a woman" does not imply "Xis no longer a girl."

As another linguist, Dwight Bolinger (1980, p. 100), put it more bluntly: "A female never grows up." His remark was prompted by an examination of job ads in the Los Angeles Times: 97 used the term gal or girl, whereas only two used boy. Neither education nor social status spares a woman from being called a girl. In a 1989 letter to the Sunday Gleaner newspaper in Jamaica, eminent jurist Morris Cargill referred to Dr. Carolyn Cooper, an academic at the University of the West Indies, as a "very clever girl." This dismissive and patronizing remark served to underline the negative force of his attack on her for having criticized an earlier letter he wrote to the newspaper. What do girls know about anything, even if they have PhDs?

Lyons's observations point to problems both with the linguist's assump- tion that meaning can be reduced to a few basic semantic distinctions, and with the use of binary values in a relation of markedness to characterize the nature of their opposition. The asymmetries between the male and female basic terms can again be easily revealed by looking at the collocations in which words such as boy and girl appear. From the following example from the Brown Corpus of American English we can see that girl is the more general term and modifiers such as grown-up and baby are used to make the age dimension clear.

Pink, Vivian once had told him, was for baby girls, and grown-up girls who wore pink were subconsciously clinging to their infancy.

The collocation grown-up girls should likewise be a contradiction in terms if the preceding semantic feature analysis were correct. Similarly, we should not expect to find expressions such as old girl, but this is in fact

136 CHAPTER 5

common (as is of course old boy, as in the expression old boy network). The same female may be referred to as a girl or woman in the same context without any semantic oddity. This raises the question of when the word woman is used and what connotations it has. In the Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen (LOB) corpus of British English from the 1960s the collocations unmarried girl and married woman are common, whereas married girl does not occur. This suggests that marriage is one of the features speakers use in deciding whether to call a female a girl or woman. This is borne out by my findings from the more recently compiled British National Corpus. The term married girl occurs 4 times, while married boy does not occur at all. Generally speaking, the word married occurs more often with the word woman ( 182 times) than it ,does with man (160 times). Likewise, the term wife is more frequent (15,918 times) than husband (10,686). There are also 984 occur- rences of housewife, but only 2 of househusband.

This follows more generally from the fact that women tend to be referred to in terms of their marital status, even though they are much less often referred to at all than men. Another finding reflecting this is the usage of titles. There are 30,031 cases where women are referred to with the titles Miss (9,123), Ms (1,313) or Mrs (19,595), compared to 14,454 cases where men are referred to as Mr. We can see from this that the nubility titles Miss and Mrs are still preferred over Ms in Britain, as I noted earlier. These findings are also in line with the fact that women are more generally referred to in terms of the roles they play, such as mothers, wives, and so on, rather than as persons in their own right. There are also more occurrences of the term mother (24,146) than there are of father (22,306). Otherwise, women are much less talked about.

This finding is in line with the results of Mira Ariel's (1988) study of how men and women in Israeli society were introduced in TV, magazines, and popular literature in the 1980s. She summarized her results in the following formulas:

F dependency > sex > profession > name > other M profession > name > dependency > other > sex

This means that for men sex is given lowest priority, whereas for women reference to sex is high priority. The most frequent reference in the intro- ductions given to men is to profession, for example, Dr. Brown, a chemical engineer, and his wife. Women, however, are most likely to be referred to first in a dependent capacity, as mothers or wives rather than in terms of their profession or as individuals in their own right. Describing a man as a husband is far less common than describing a woman as a wife. Women are introduced as females more often than men are introduced as males. Male authors introduce women as females 4 times more often than they

WHAT'S IN A NAME? 137

introduce men as males. Even women write in the male style, although to a lesser extent. Women authors introduce women as females 1.5 times as often as they introduce men as males.

Ariel points out that the initial information we receive about a person is of primary importance in impression formation. It influences the way that we organize and evaluate the whole text. Twice as many women as men were described in terms of how they looked. The media also tended to use first names for women rather than only last names or full names. Women politicians were referred to by first name, such as Golda (Meir), Maggie (Thatcher), and Jihan (Sadat).

Contemporary media in the English-speaking world show similar pat- terns. In an interview with Emma Nicholson, for example, a member of Parliament who was about to lobby Margaret Thatcher for compensation for hemophiliac victims of AIDS, BBC Radio 4 introduced her by saying that she was there "in a red dress, with a handbag, so well armed" (Today Programme, November 11, 1989). Clare Burstall, Director of the National Foundation for Education Research, was described by the Times Higher Educational Supplement {March 8, 1991) as being "five foot nothing" and having "blond hair" and an "animated manner." Although these examples are slightly dated, such practices continue. In noting the first overseas visit of Madeleine Albright in her capacity as newly appointed U.S. Secretary of State, the Financial Times reported what she wore. Similarly, a cover story for Newsweek (February 10, 1997) described Albright as a "divorced mother," provided intimate details about her divorce, and noted that she had not dated seriously since. Rarely do reports about women discuss only their professional lives and qualifications.

Gunnar Persson (1990, p. 50) looked at some of the contexts in which terms such as man, woman, boy, gentleman, and lady are used in two corpora dating from the 1960s, Brown and LOB. He found that man was more than three times as frequent as woman in LOB and nearly three times as frequent in Brown. These asymmetries reflect a number of things: One is that men are more often talked about, as the statistics on the frequencies of he/she in the last chapter showed. The second is that most of the authors of the texts are men. However, another factor is that the overwhelming majority of the uses of girl refer to adult women. This is one reason why girl is 40% more frequent in LOB than boy. The data also indicate that lady is also a substitute for woman more so than gentleman is for man. Yet even with these adjustments, man is still much more frequent than woman, as can be seen in Table 5.2.

When we compare the figures I have added from a 3-million-word subsample of the more recent British National Corpus, we can see the same basic asymmetries, but the gap between references to men and women has lessened considerably in the space of roughly 30 years. For example, if we

138

man, men generic

woman, women boy, boys girl, girls

TABLE 5.2 Frequency of Occurrence of Man, Woman, Boy, Girl,

Gentleman, and Lady in Three Computer Corpora

LOB Brown

1,763 1,340 130 185 496 469 334 409 458 374

gentleman, gentlemen 63 49 lady, ladies 184 122

CHAPTER 5

British National

92,797

58,816 19,269 22,613

6,235 11,960

add the occurrences of lady to those of women we get 70,776, which can be compared with the total for man and gentleman 99,032. The real figure for references to women is actually higher than that since some of the instances of girl refer to adults. I have also not taken into account how many of the occurrences of man are generic. Nevertheless, it appears that in the 1960s men are referred to nearly 3 times as often as women, whereas in the mid-1990s, men are referred to only 1.4 times as often as women.

Persson also looked at collocations between adjectives and the terms man/boy and woman/girl in LOB and Brown. He grouped the adjectives

·according to whether they were positive (e.g., attractive, handsome, good, rich), neutral (e.g., dark-haired), or negative (e.g., fat, ugly, silly). This classification is rather difficult to apply because what may be positive for a woman may be negative for a man, and vice versa. No doubt the reason why we regard some adjectives as negative is their long-standing association with women. Nevertheless, Persson's results in Table 5.3 are revealing.

Among the adjectives Persson regarded as positive that occurred more than once with girl were attractive, beautiful, golden, good, lovely, lucky, nice, old, and pretty. Among the so-called neutral words occurring more than once were blond(e), brown(y)-haired, dark-haired, little, naked, small, tall, unmarried, and young. Among the negative ones occurring more than once were fat, silly, strange, thin, and ugly.

Both women and girls are associated with weakness and helplessness, as can be seen in collocations with adjectives such as helpless, defenseless,

girl woman boy man

TABLE 5.3 Collocations With Man/Boy and Woman/Girl in LOB and Brown

Positive Neutral

39 22 49 30 27 21

173 110

Negative

24 44 33

113

WHAT'S IN A NAME? 139

fragile, poor, pathetic, and so forth. Girl is most frequently associated with negative attributes involving looks and intelligence. There is a huge number of very negative adjectives such as evil, frightful, debauched, chattering, gossiping, scheming, and so forth. The word man, on the other hand, is associated with many positive attributes. Although with women the positive attributes focus mainly on looks, with men there is a wider range of ad- jectives denoting mental properties, such as intelligent, learned, and edu- cated, and of personality traits, such as kind, noble, and brave. However, there is also a large set of negative attributes for men, such as violent, weak, and spineless. Persson concluded that the terms man and girl tend to collocate on the whole with more positive adjectives than do woman and boy.

Here we see yet another apparent asymmetry; for the male, the adult term is positive, whereas for the female, the adult term is the one with more negative associations. This may reinforce a reluctance to use the term woman. The adult female is too threatening to men. She is too charged with sexuality as well as with other negative connotations-hence the euphe- mism lady. Unintentionally, Persson adopted these distinctions in his own writing. When reporting an example from a BBC television comedy in which a male character says "Interesting girl-sorry, woman, er ... person," Persson commented (1990, p. 64), "an embarrassed young male doctor discussing a Lesbian woman with a young lady with feminist leanings." The lesbian female is referred to as a woman, whereas the feminist is a lady!

It is instructive to look at some of the collocations of man/woman and boy/girl in the more recent British National Corpus for comparison (Table 5.4). Not surprisingly, words with negative overtones are still more fre- quently used together with girl/woman than with boy/man. I have also included lady, which competes with girl and woman. The figures indicate

TABLE 5.4 Collocations With Gentleman/Man/Woman/Lady

and Boy/Girl in the British National Corpus

woman girl lady man boy gentleman

blonde 25 28 0 1 1 frigid 2 0 0 0 0 good 57 253 0 258 216 honest 11 2 0 68 1 hysterical 14 1 0 0 intelligent 17 9 0 44 3 loose 3 2 0 1 1 neurotic 2 2 0 2 0 silly 16 35 1 0 10 ugly 6 4 0 0 0

140 CHAPTER 5

the number of times words such as silly, hysterical, and such are found together with the basic terms man, woman/lady, boy, and girl in a sample of 3 million words.

We can start by comparing collocations containing positive adjectives such as good, honest, and intelligent. Men are more likely to be referred to with these adjectives than women, although the results for good require a more complex interpretation. It may be due to the social stereotype of the "good girl" that the expression good girl is used more often than good boy. Another possibility may be that Persson is right in thinking that girl is more generally positive than boy. However, this is not borne out by some of the other collocations here, such as silly girl. Negative terms such as frigid, neurotic, and loose, relating to sexuality, occur predominantly with the female terms, as do terms such as blond{e) and ugly, describing appearance. Women's association with blondness may derive partly from fairy-tale images, where the heroine, overwhelmed or enchanted, is often blonde with masses of golden hair as in Goldilocks or Rapunzel. Other popular images of blonde females are found in the stereotype of the "dumb blonde" and the advertising industry's slogan used to promote hair coloring that asked, "Is it true blondes have more fun?"

The term lady still stands out as an anomaly, not collocating very often with any of these adjectives. The only adjective it is found frequently with is old; this may be due partly to the expression old lady to refer to one's wife.

THE LESSER MAN

Other naming practices that show the negative connotations as well as the markedness of females can be found in the many cases where female terms are formed from the male terms by adding endings such as -ess/-ette, such as actor/actress or major/majorette. Such usages are not arbitrary. We can compare other terms such as salesman/saleswoman/saleslady, and salesgirl (though not salesboy). This is found in other languages too, such as German, where der Student (the student) is male and die Studentin 'the student' is female. Another example of asymmetry of reference to men and women that takes the form of marking the female comes from Italian, where the definite article is used in front of a woman's but not a man's surname for example, e arrivata la Rossi/e arrivato Rossi. Note that the argument ~sed by my colleague about the need to mark women with titles doesn't apply here because the verb forms are already gender marked in Italian, which makes it perfectly clear whether the Rossi referred to is male or female, if anyone needs to know. The English-speaking press has also been reluctant to refer to women by last name only (see chap. 10 on how reform has affected these usages).

I l

WHAT'S IN A NAME? 141

Women are also more likely to be addressed in adulthood with names marked with the diminutive suffix -iel-y more so than men. An adult called Chrissie i.5 more likely to be a woman named Christina or Christine, and Chris, a man named Christopher. Four-year-old Robby or Bobby insists on being called Rob or Bob when older, just as children who continue to address their mother or father as Mommy and Daddy will be regarded as babyish. Interestingly, articles of women's and children's clothing are more likely to be referred to with diminutive endings than those worn by men, such as nappy (American English 'diaper'), panties/undies ('underpants': note also British English smalls), nightie ('nightgown'), hanky ('handker- chief'), and jammies ('pajamas'). One exception I have found is male un- derwear referred to as skivvies, which is apparently U.S. Marine Corps slang dating from World War II. Names given to household pets are also often diminutive forms. Baby talk, that is, talk addressed by adults to children, often contains many diminutive forms, like potty, doggy, beddy- bye, and so forth. Sometimes the diminutive -ie!-y suffix is combined with other diminutive suffixes such as -kin or -s, such as Suzykins.

David Crystal (1995, p. 153) uncovered further gender differences in the names commonly given to men and women. Based on his analysis of 1,667 entries in a dictionary of English first names, he found that female names tended to be longer than male names. There were few female names containing only one syllable (e.g., Ann, Joan, May). Many more male names contained only one syllable (e.g., john, James, Fred, Frank). Where male names did contain more than one syllable, 95% had a strongly stressed first syllable (e.g., Jonathan, Edward). None of the most popular male names in Britain had a strongly stressed second syllable. Only 75% of women's names with more than one syllable had initial stressed syllables (e.g., Catherine, Ellen, etc.). The others had unstressed first syllables (e.g., Elizabeth, Rebecca, Patricia).

Crystal also found that the stressed vowels of female names also made more use of the high front vowel Iii (e.g., Cecilia, Lisa, Tina, Maxine). Male names with stressed Iii were much less common (e.g., Steven, Keith). Female names were also more likely to end in a vowel (e.g., Linda, Beverley, Tracey). If the last sound was not a vowel, it was likely to be a nasal sound (e.g., jean, Pam). Male names, on the other hand, were more likely to end in so-called "hard" (or more technically "stop") consonants (e.g., Dick, Bob, David, Pete). Thus, a name like Bob is prototypically masculine by all these criteria. It has one syllable and ends in a stop consonant. By contrast, Sabrina is prototypically feminine. It has more than one syllable, ends in a vowel, begins with an unstressed syllable, and contains the vowel Iii in stressed position. Similarly, Christine and Christina are highly femi- nine. In fact, in one U.S. survey men judged Christine to be the most sexy female name.

142 CHAPTER 5

I noted in chapter 3 the folk tradition of regarding languages with more vowels as more feminine and those with more consonants as more masculine in my mention of Jespersen's views on the Hawaiian language compared with Germanic languages like English.

Some of Crystal's findings about sound symbolism may well be tied to my earlier observations about nicknames. Another reason why Bob does not want to be called Bobby when h,e gets older is due to the fact that /ii is a prominent sound in many female names. In turn, there has also been independent evidence suggesting an association between words containing that sound and smallness. Some phoneticians have suggested a physiological explanation, namely, that smaller vocal tracts, typical of smaller and less threatening creatures, produce higher pitched sounds (see chap. 2). Thus, suffixes and names containing this sound indicating smallness get used in names referring to women. In languages other than English it is also com- mon for the diminutive to be expressed by high front vowels, by consonants articulated in the front rather than back of the vocal tract (e.g., !bl as opposed to /kl), and by vowels with high tone. Thus, there are similarities in the way the diminutive is marked, as well as in its range of meanings, as I show later.

Although more research needs to be done on other languages before we can conclude anything more from this discussion, regularities in sound symbolism are intriguing because they point to areas of language where the relationship between sound and meaning is not entirely arbitrary. Crys- tal raised the interesting question of whether Kate is more masculine sound- ing than Katie or Kath. Some challenges to this analysis, however, are raised by Anna Wierzbicka's discussion of Australian English naming and nicknaming practices. Australian English shows an overwhelming preference for monosyllabic nicknames ending in a consonant (particularly -z), which fit the masculine prototype just discussed, such as Caz (Gary), Baz (Barry), Marz (Mary), Al (Alice), and others. Although the diminutives ending in -il-ie found more generally in English also occur, interestingly, a child called Suzie is likely to become Suz when she becomes a teenager. Wierzbicka attributes this shift to teenagers' need to display their friendships in "tough," "non-babyish," and "non-sentimental" terms. Observers of Australian cul- ture have noted informally its generally masculine character and emphasis on male values such as "mateship" forged through historical associations with convict settlement and bushranging.

At the same time, however, commentators on Australian speech have noted its greater tendency to diminutive forms such as cozzie (swimming costume/bathing suit), prezzie (present), mozzie (mosquito), barbie (barbe- cue), and so on. Other words take the suffix -o, such as compo (workman's compensation), rego (car registration), preggo (pregnant), journo (journal- ist), and arvo (afternoon). Wierzbicka argues that these forms are not really

f I '" '

I t ,, '

WHATS IN A NAME? 143

equivalent in meaning to the common diminutives used in other varieties of English. One fact that supports her claim is that they are used as much by men as women. It would not be strange, for instance, for an Australian man to complain about maggies (magpies), but it would be unthinkable for him to use the term birdies. The meaning of the Australian usages seems to reflect informality, a desire to "knock things down to size," and not to make a big deal of things.

Other English suffixes such as -ette used both in women's names and occupational titles also show a complicated historical association with women and small things. Suffragette, for example, one of the key words of the early 20th century, appears to have been the first word in which the suffix -ette was used to indicate a female person. The movement to enfranchise women began in the mid 1880s when a resolution supporting suffrage for women was brought before the British Parliament. However, the Oxford English Dictionary records the first usage of the word in 1906 from an article in the Daily Mail in which the leaders of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), formed in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, Christabel and Sylvia, were called suffragettes. The women were referred to as martyrettes by another newspaper. The WSPU adopted the label suffragette, although some women never liked it because it was a term often used by their opponents to belittle them, just as the shortened form women's fibber is often pejorative today. Even though the American press applied the term to American women seeking the vote, many of the women prominent in the suffrage movement in the United States preferred the term suffragist.

In an entry published in 1915 the Oxford English Dictionary defined suffragette as "a female supporter of the cause of women's political enfran- chisement, esp. one of a violent or 'militant' type." The word militant is placed within inverted commas because it was a new 20th century use of the term. Emmeline Pankhurst was one of the first militants in this political or trade union sense of a person who advocated the use of direct action, demonstra- tions, and so forth as a way of enforcing or obtaining change.

Although the suffix -ette was in English earlier, from the 18th century onward, it had two main functions when added to a noun: (1) It indicated something small of its kind, such as balconette (1876), novelette (1820), kitchenette (1910), launderette (1949), and others; and (2) it indicated a cheaper imitation of something, as used for example by manufacturers for materials intended as imitations of some other more expensive cloth or fabric, such as leatherette (1880), flannelette (1882), and satinette (1904). Coinages of the first type to indicate something small are still occurring, such as diskette ( 1973 ). In the 20th century other formations with -ette indicating a woman in a certain occupation occur, such as usherette (1925) and majorette (1941). From 1919 for about 30 years female undergraduates

144 CHAPTER 5

were called undergraduettes. The term professorette was used at Berkeley in the 1950s to refer to a teaching assistant.

Former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary Robert Burchfield (1989, p. 66), who cited these examples of earlier usage, also recorded an inter- esting case in the Observer (October 16, 1988, p. 52) by the journalist John Naughton, who referred to a junior member of the trade as a hackette (it is not clear, however, whether this junior member was female). Other journalistic usages occurred in Private Eye (September 16, 1988, p. 6), which referred to Polly Samson as a "dauntingly beautiful hypette," and the Chicago Sun Times (April 28, 1988, p. 2), which mentioned a snoopette (again gender indeterminate, but I suspect female). Other usages of this type that suggest a snide reference to women are awarette, editorette, voguette, and whizzette. The term Veepette was even applied to former U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle. We can see here some of the historical trends I discussed in the last chapter, namely, that terms associated with women become more negative over time. No endings first used to derive feminine forms are later used to derive masculine ones. In chapter 3 I showed how other languages such as the Dizi language of southwestern Ethiopia single out what is small and what is female by grouping them in the same gender class. Everything else is masculine by default.

Many other feminine occupational terms are formally derived from the male version. For example, the term actor is assumed to be male, and the derived form actress is female. (Compare also manager/manageress common in British English, poet/poetess, etc.) Another example is hero/heroine. Many women's names are diminutives of men's, such as Henrietta (Henry), Geor- gette/Georgina (George), and Pauline (Paul). Some have noted that sorp.e names that were originally male, like Shirley, Leslie, Beverley, and Jocelyn, became popular as female names and then were no longer used for boys. This may be due to the stereotypically feminine sound patterns found in them. There are no reported cases of girls' names being appropriated for boys. Nor can male names be derived from female names; Doreen or Sabrina is not matched by Dor or Sabrin. Generally speaking, there is little overlap between male and female names in English.

When we look at languages other than English we can see some of the same trends. The Italian suffix -essa related to English -ette/-ess has similar negative, comic, and belittling connotations, as can be seen in words such as filosofessa 'pedantic and conceited woman'. The Chinese language has a feminine-specific root nu that marks ideographs associated with women in much the same way as the English suffixes -ette and -ess do. However, it also appears in words belonging to four other semantic fields (see Penelope, 1990, pp. 84-88):

1. Words that refer to an occupation, position, or state of women in society, such as mother or wife.

WHAT'S IN A NAME? 145

2. Words that include activities or actions including women, such as to be pregnant.

3. Words that describe attributes men believe to be desirable in women, such as graceful and attractive.

4. Words that refer to evil in general or evil characteristics of people, such as jealousy, hate, foolish, and greedy.

Daniel Jurafsky ( 1996) attempted to identify universal tendencies in the meanings of the so-called diminutive in order to explain the wide range in its connotations, including smallness of size, femaleness, and affection, among others. In Cantonese, for instance, the diminutive can be used to mark a small object resembling some large object, to mark female gender, and to mark socially marginalized women such as prostitutes, a dance hostess, or a frigid woman. In another variety of Chinese the diminutive marks a 'foreigner'. Compare the term /imey to refer to an 'English- man/woman' and Okie (originally a diminutive of Oklahoma) to refer to poor migrant farm laborers. In chapter 3 I observed some of the connections between women and foreigners.

In languages such as Hebrew with grammatical gender the unmarked form without the diminutive is masculine in gender, whereas the diminutive form is marked for feminine gender. Compare mapa (m) 'tablecloth' with mapit (f) 'napkin'. In languages such as Ojibwa and Tibetan the diminutive marks a form as denoting 'young' in contrast to 'old' or 'adult', such as Ojibwa kwe 'woman' versus kwezens 'girl' and Tibetan dom 'bear' versus dom-bu 'bear cub'. As I pointed out in chapter 3, in languages like German the word itself for 'girl' (Miidchen) is a diminutive form (compare Junge 'boy'), although grammatically it is neuter in gender.

Jurafsky argued that the concepts "small" and "child" lie at the heart of the semantics of the diminutive cross-linguistically. The other senses are derived by metaphorical extension from "child" to create more evaluative meanings such as contempt, ridicule, intimacy, marginality, or affection seen in some of the terms like hackette, sweetie, and so on that I looked at earlier. I argued in chapter 3 that sex and gender are highly salient dimensions for classification. Because woman is the classic and quintessen- tial Other, metaphors in which females are the source or target are common cross-linguistically. The metaphors that make it possible for diminutive markers to be extended from their original meanings of "child" and "small" are: Women are children. Women are small (things). Women are generally smaller than men and, like children, subordinate to men. That is why a wife is "the little woman." Interestingly, these characteristics of women as small and childlike link women metaphorically with children in quite dif- ferent ways than in their capacity as mothers (see chap. 4 for a discussion of metaphorical extensions of mothers).

146 CHAPTER 5

Certain pragmatic uses of diminutives in meaning "small" also serve to mitigate requests by making them seem less of an imposition. In Dutch, for instance, a visitor says she will stay only an uurtje 'a little hour'. Compare English, "Can you give me a little help?" In the next chapter I discuss the use of hedging requests as a feature of politeness associated with women.

THE INVISIBLE WOMAN: A ROSE BY ANOTHER NAME

It may at first glance seem paradoxical that language seems to single out women for special treatment by marking them as deviant and inferior at the same time as it serves to make them invisible through androcentric generics. Many feminists have pointed out that it is difficult even to trace the history of women because the history of most countries, as Virginia Woolf wrote (1928a) in talking about England, is "the history of the male line." The opening of the Gospel according to St. Matthew gives an im- pressive list of 30 males successively begetting one another from the Patri- arch Abraham down to Christ. Only once is a woman mentioned, not because she plays the role of begetter, but because she is a non-Jewish Moabite. Men are seen as the creative force. Fathers pass their names on to both male and female children, and when women marry they have traditionally taken the names of their husbands, abandoning their "maiden names" and becoming, as Una Stannard (1977) put it, "Mrs. Man." In Greece, a married woman takes the possessive form of her hus- band's name, indicating that she belongs to him. In Arabic a married woman is usually not referred to by name, but by the title "wife of X." In China, adult women may have no proper names but only names which refer to them in some role, for example, "third daughter," "little sister," and so on. Susan Blum (1997, p. 363) mentions Alice Murong Pu Lin's story entitled "Grandmother Had No Name" as an example where Lin's grandmother had no name of her own, but was referred to as "wife of Li." Even Lin's mother did not know her own mother's name. There are Chinese males with no proper names but they tend, not sur- prisingly, to be low in social status. Upper class men often have a multitude of names. In Western culture, a woman who has remarried can pass through several name changes. The Book of Common Prayer pronounces a man and a woman as "man and wife." His status as a person remains the same, whereas she exchanges her person for a role. Even though some churches have changed this line in the marriage service to read "husband and wife," they have often retained the traditional order of male before female.

WHAT'S IN A NAME? 147

Only men have a right to the permanency of their names. In Western societies when there is no male heir, a family's line dies out because there is no one to carry on the name. Traditional Scandinavian naming practices call aMention to the importance of the male heir line because both the female and male children in a family would carry names such as Johansson, literally 'Johann's son' and even in Iceland, where names such as Jo- hannsdottir 'Johann's daughter' were used, the female child is still seen as a possession of the father. This is yet another way in which women become invisible.

Nothing is more personal or as closely related to our identity as our names. This explains one reason why having your name misspelled or mispronounced can be so irritating. A rose by any other name does not smell as sweet. One of the struggles in the women's movement has centered on the legal right to name or rename ourselves. The issue of naming was prominent at the 1848 convention on women's rights when women signed the Declaration of Sentiments with their own first names. When Lucy Stone tried to vote in 1879 in Massachusetts using her birth name, she was prevented from doing so, even though there was no law requiring wives to use their husbands' names. Stone proclaimed, "My name is a symbol of my identity which must not be lost." An American colleague of mine who married an Australian and wanted to keep her own name was dismayed when told by U.S. immigration officials reviewing her husband's application for a residence permit that she would have to take her husband's name to prove she was "really" married.

A common practice among some feminists has been to replace the father's last name with the name of a female friend or relative, or to drop the father's name. In this way, Julia Stanley has become Julia Penelope. Similar motivations are behind the change in designations witnessed among newly independent countries such as Vanuatu (formerly the New Hebrides) and Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia), and the practice among certain Black Mus- lims to take new names. In his autobiography Malcolm X made the point that the names of Blacks were appropriated by their White masters.

In changing their names, women and other minorities are asserting their right to be called by a name of their own choosing rather than one given by an oppressor. Names are a fundamental part of our identity. Whoever names has power, as indicated in the epigraph to this chapter. The biblical account of the world's creation tells us that God gave Adam the right to name the animals and to have dominion over them (see chap. 2).

Due to the power inherent in the naming process, subordinate groups have pressed for reforms in usage in order to promote a positive self-image. When African Americans first adopted the name Black to refer to themselves (in place of Negro or colored) and asserted that Black is beautiful, they were attempting to create a positive image for blackness, just as women have been

148 CHAPTER 5

trying to reclaim or revalorize derogatory names such as crone, hag, and such. The group Queer Nation is trying to achieve precisely this by adopting the abusive name for themselves as an act of defiance and gay pride.

Yet, like words referring to women, the ten~ black still has negative connotations, as can be seen in terms such as black market, black sheep, blackball, and others. Attempts to reclaim a word may not always have the intended effect (see chap. 10 for further discussion of the "rename and reclaim" approach to reform). When the Reverend Jesse Jackson announced that Blacks should be called African Americans, some argued that this was a meaningless or arbitrary change-" onomastic restlessness." Significantly, however, the derogatory term nigger has not been reclaimed. Its power to degrade and abuse has even made it practically ineffable, at least, on White lips. In the 0. J. Simpson trial it was referred to publicly as "the N word."

Just as many colonized peoples are writing their own histories, many women are now trying to write "herstory" or "hystery" as a way of replacing history as a story told in men's words about men by men. Under patriarchy, women's experience had no cultural or political significance. It is important to find a voice in which to talk back as the subject of one's own experience rather than be the object of someone else's. Rewriting the past at the same time provides a means of reconceptualizing the future, as I show in chapter 11. French feminists have discussed the paradox of how women are still able to express their own points of view from within what Penelope would call PUD (see chap. 4).

These challenges raise the issue of whether there is a "women's lan- guage," as many such as Robin Lakoff have claimed. If so, what distin- guishes it? In the next chapter I consider this question.

EXERCISES AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Samuel Johnson was 67 and his friend Mrs. Thrale 35. The language of Johnson and Mrs. Thrale, and that of their adult contemporaries, was the stately language of the time, polished, stylish, unordinary, even in the intimate pages of their diaries, and the regime of instruction was severe and practical. Hester Thrale wrote in her diary (see Burchfield, 1989, p. 117). Analyze the patterns of address in this passage.

2. Write down as many terms as you can think of that are used to refer to men/boys and women/girls, such as bloke, bird, lad, bitch, bastard, and so on. What do ways of referring to men and women demonstrate about the values and behaviors associated with the two sexes? When you evaluate the connotations associated with each word, do you find any patterns? One way of looking at the connotations is to mark each word according to whether it is associated with animals (A), objects (0), food (F), sex (S),

WHAT'S IN A NAME? 149

young (Y), old (01), no positive or negative connotation-neutral (N), posi- tive connotation (P), derogatory or negative connotation (D). Each word may be characterized by more than one of these features. You can include whate\rer other categories you need.

3. Keep a diary for a week in which you write down all the t~rms of address people have used in speaking or writing to you. Include m your entries information about the context and the relationship between you and the person addressing you.

4. Janet Holmes (1995, p. 145) gave this example of an asymmetrical greeting pattern in New Zealand at a police station desk .. A woman sta~ds waiting while a male police officer finishes what he 1s domg before paymg

attention to her.

Male: Momin' love. Female: Good morning, officer. And it's not "love" it's sergeant.

Make observations of patterns of address in public service encounters, such as at a restaurant, post office, doctor's office, or some other public place. How are men and women referred to?

5. Does your name fit the patterns observed by David Crystal? Explain

why or why not.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

Robin Lakoff's book (1990) has an extensive discussion of the semantic contrast between woman and lady (see also Julia Penelope, 1990). Geoffrey Crossick's article (1991) and K. C. Phillips's book (1984) contain a dis- cussion of the terms gentleman and lady in the Victorian era. Suzanne Romaine's (1997b) article illustrates how the Pygmalion myth has been reworked in the construction of the concept of lady in the guise of "glamour girl." The semantic analysis of the terms man/woman, boy/girl can be found in Geoffrey Leech's textbook (1974, pp. 96-102). Carolyn Cooper (1995) describes the name-calling incident in her book. Kathleen Connors's article (1971) contains a discussion and useful bibliography of feminine agentive suffixes in European (particularly the Romance) languages. Further infor- mation on gender in Italian can be found in Giulio Lepschy's (1987) and Dominic Stewart's (1987) articles. Ann Cutler, James McQueen, and Ken Robinson's (1990) article contains a more detailed analysis of the sound patterns in men's and women's names.