Steven Pinker's new book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, is due out and if you've never heard of him, go buy his book or one of his numerous other ones. No, I'm not getting paid by his publicist to write this. I actually like him. Even more so having read the tiny extract from his new book, published in The Times.
The extract focuses on the subject of new words, more specifically words that are made up to describe things that have no specific word of their own: egosurfing, metrosexual, you get the picture, these are words that are usually a melange of two existing words, that are created to fill a void in our ever developing world.
Pinker states that these sorts of words are usually too contextual and self-referential. The words themselves are representative of how much they are needed. These words aren't just explanatory, they are cool and part of the inside joke of main stream culture. It's post-modernism at its worst. And of course, its best. The fluidity of language is becoming more and more mainstream: slang is not longer solely associated with cultural groups outside the norm.
I think that this has also been the demise of a number of words that women have tried to reclaim over the years. They are too self-referntial and are only understood amongst a certain group of people. Take for instance the term 'womyn', also spelled 'wimmin' and 'wommon': it's purpose is to remove the male/man, in illustration of the fact that women are no simply subsets of men, they are not secondary nor defined according to man. Outside of certain feminists, the term is never used. I say, 'certain feminists' because not all feminists agree with the different spelling. In fact, they argue, it does nothing more than illustrate how women are not like men and never will be. There is also some concern that it is semantics and that the women living in shelters, hiding from abusive husbands, don't give a damn how you spell woman.
How about 'bitch' and 'cunt'? These two words have been reclaimed, rejected, and reclaimed by feminism and mainstream culture. 'Bitch' is now rarely censored on television and 'cunt' has been making its way up the vocabulary ladder since Lady Chatterley's Lover, though still often referred to as 'the C word'. These are words whose reclamation, of course not by all, has not really been attributed to feminism and isn't so much associated with female empowerment, but more with less taboo and restrictive use of language.
'Ms' is probably one term, even though its really a sort of abbreviation, that feminism has managed to squeeze into the mainstream. You see it on more and more official documents and rarely do people think you just don't know how to spell properly. Of course, there's always the exception.
But an abbreviation isn't really all that to get excited about? Surely language has become a bit more gender-neutral or at least less derogatory towards women? No, not really, at least not in my opinion.
