Our final guest post in a somewhat longer gender English month comes from freelance lexicographer and editor Janet Gough.

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A 1981 postcard published by The Women’s Press presents us with the following predicament:

Dear Sirs • man to man • manpower • craftsman
working men • the thinking man • the man in the street
fellow countrymen • the history of mankind
one-man show • man in his wisdom • statesman
forefathers • masterful • masterpiece • old masters
the brotherhood of man • Liberty Equality Fraternity
sons of free men • faith of our fathers • god the father
god the son • yours fraternally • amen • words fail me

Thirty years later, do words continue to fail us? The English language is still without acceptable gender-neutral replacements for many of the above terms. For some of them, female alternatives are available (woman to woman; the history of womankind), for a few there are ‘both-gender’ terms (Dear Sir/Madam is an accepted alternative formal term of address when the sex of the intended recipient is unknown), and one or two have been largely supplanted by lexical alternatives (personnel for manpower). But what of the others? France’s national motto has not yet granted equality to Sisterhood alongside Fraternity, despite the fact that Marianne, the idealized embodiment of Liberty, is herself female.

As Aneta Naumoska pointed out in a recent post, there have been many attempts to redress the balance by advocating alternative forms that will ‘free women from their position of being lexically obscure’, with variants such as herstory for history – a term which goes beyond feminizing the lexis per se, aiming as it does to redirect the entire focus of historical research away from its traditionally male-dominated perspective.

In fact, the word history in itself is not a product of an etymological gender bias. The his in history is entirely unrelated to the masculine possessive pronoun his, the word being derived instead from Latin historia, meaning simply (a narrative of) learning through research or inquiry. If we were, however, to propose a new term for history based on the false morphology of his + story, then perhaps hystery would be appropriate, its etymology drawn from the Greek hustera, (hyster-), womb. At the same time we could perhaps find a less misogynist replacement for hysteria, which comes from the same Greek root, the term being, in its original sense, a medical condition characterized by a complete lack of control over one’s emotions or actions, which was originally believed to be an exclusively feminine ailment caused by a malfunction of the womb.

But what of the word woman itself, together with its plural women?

In an attempt to address the perceived sexism inherent in the second morpheme man, various substitute spellings for woman/women have made their appearance in recent years (womon, womyn, and wimmin: of these, only the latter seems to have gained widespread currency).

Ironically, from an etymological point of view, it is not the second morpheme of woman that should be construed as the sexist one. In Old English, man simply denoted a person, of either sex. The prefix wo in woman derives from Old English wyf [= a female human being; hence modern English wife]. Like its counterpart, the prefix wer [= a male human being], wyf was added to the stem man only when it was necessary to distinguish between the sexes. Over time however, the wer prefix was dropped when referring specifically to a male of the species, so that in effect, the word man became both hypernym man – a human being – and hyponym man – a male human being. The male of the species thus became the canonical form, or archetype, whilst the female, still tied to its wo prefix, a subordinate, derivative form.

Perhaps if women are to gain true equality, in language as well as in society, the way forward is not to replace but to reclaim the word man, in its original, gender-neutral sense – and to find a new prefix to specify the male of the species.

A recent study used a Twitter-based corpus to examine the relationship between language and gender. One of the things it looked at was “gender-skewed words” – words used by one gender more than the other. Among the words used predominantly by girls and women were: feel, love, hair, sleep, wait, cute, yummy, totally, aww, ugh, and wanna. (Males hardly feature on the list of most gender-skewed words, offering just google and http.)

That men rarely use cute has been reported before. Jane Mills, in Womanwords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Patriarchal Society, quotes Cheris Kramarae writing in the Quarterly Journal of Speech:

As one male student in my speech class said, ‘If I heard a guy say something was “cute”, I’d wonder about him’. That is, his masculinity would be in question.

Obviously it depends on the context, so let’s take a closer look. Cute comes from acute, which comes from Latin acuere “sharpen”, from acus “needle”. Centuries ago, cute and acute were used to describe people – males and females alike – as sharp, that is, clever or quick-witted. Over time, cute came to be used principally to refer to appearance, while the “sharp” sense receded somewhat and took on negative connotations.

Cute has three senses listed in Macmillan Dictionary, two of them having to do with physical attractiveness. The third, described as mainly American, is “clever in a way that shows a lack of respect or honesty”, as in the example supplied: “Don’t you get cute with me, young man!” In The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler wrote: “The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with” – in other words, too clever for their own good.

In Ireland, things are a little different. Irish English has a version of this lesser sense of cute that is typically heard in the colloquialism “cute hoor”. Hoor in this case derives from whore but doesn’t have anything necessarily to do with sex; rather, it’s a general term of abuse applied usually to males, often corrupt ones. A cute hoor is someone cunning and devious. It’s commonly heard in political contexts, and has given rise to the noun phrase “cute hoorism”:

This is the kind of political cute hoorism that has the economy where it is today.
(Irish Times, 30 June 2011)

Like many Irish insults, hoor is sometimes used with affection, even respect. It can also indicate strong or unhealthy fondness (“He’s an awful hoor for the horses/drink”). So you could say I’m an awful hoor for the words, and I would not be offended. I might even find it cute.

A recent addition to the Open Dictionary is the word demirep. It’s not a new word – in fact it’s been around since at least 1749 when Henry Fielding used the term in his novel Tom Jones:

‘… he had no knowledge of that character which is vulgarly called a demirep.’

But it must have been relatively new at the time, because he added a definition of his own in the text:

that is to say, a woman who intrigues with every man she likes, under the name and appearance of virtue; and who, though some over-nice ladies will not be seen with her, is visited (as they term it) by the whole town, in short, whom everybody knows to be what nobody calls her.

The word is made up of a prefix, demi-, followed by rep, which is simply the  beginning of the word reputation. In this instance, the prefix carries the meaning of ‘half’, so a demirep is a woman who has only half a reputation.

The use of demi with the meaning ‘half’ or ‘small’ is well established in English, going back to at least the 15th century, and appears in a famous speech in Shakespeare’s Richard II when John of Gaunt refers to England as ‘This other Eden, demi-paradise’.

Macmillan English Dictionary has several words starting with demi: demi-monde, demigod, demijohn, and there are plenty of others out there, such as demitasse (a small coffee cup, or its contents, which OED dates back to 1842). In the case of demi-monde (another rather old-fashioned term), the prefix serves a similar purpose to that in demirep, and the demi-monde is that part of society that is slightly louche, while a demigod is a minor deity, with not all the attributes of a full-on god. Musicians will be familiar with the ‘demisemiquaver’, which denotes ‘half a semiquaver‘, or what American speakers call a ‘thirty-second note’. (There is an even shorter musical note known as a ‘hemidemisemiquaver’ – so here we get three prefixes in a row, all meaning ‘half’.)

Etymologically-minded readers will have spotted that demijohn does not fit this category. A demijohn is a large bottle, and is certainly not ‘half a john’.

Although the true etymology remains uncertain, there is a case for the word being a corruption of the French Dame Jeanne (literally, Lady Jane in English). Legend has it that one stormy night in 1347, Queen Jeanne of Naples took refuge in the home of a glass blower in Provence. The following day, she asked to be shown how he made his glassware, and, because he was so nervous in the presence of royalty, the glass blower rather overdid the blowing, and created an enormous bottle with a capacity of ten litres. It caused so much admiration among those present that he decided to start manufacturing more of them and wanted to call them Queen Jeanne, but the queen very modestly suggested Dame Jeanne instead.

A recent addition to the open dictionary is the word demirep. It’s not a new word – in  fact it’s been around since at least 1749 when Henry Fielding used the term in his novel Tom Jones: “...he had no knowledge of that character which is vulgarly called a demirep”. But it must have been relatively new at the time, because he added a definition of his own in the text: “that is to say, a woman who intrigues with every man she likes, under the name and appearance of virtue; and who, though some over-nice ladies will not be seen with her, is visited (as they term it) by the whole town, in short, whom everybody knows to be what nobody calls her.”

The upcoming June Bonfire Festival (13th to 29th June) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil has me thinking about the word bonfire itself. All over the world people use bonfires to celebrate local events. In the United States it is tradition to mark a community’s Homecoming Day by a gathering around a bonfire. In the UK Bonfire Night marks a cold November day when Guy Fawkes tried to blow up parliament back in 1605. Many European communities gather around a bonfire to welcome the Summer Solstice on the 21st June.

In Brazil the bonfires are a tribute to the collective feast days of St Anthony, St John and St Peter. These occur at squares, clubs, schools and churches and can include a mock country wedding by light of bonfires as well as games, music, dance and fireworks.

But where does the word bonfire actually come from? I had always assumed its close association with celebration suggested that it may have been a combination of the French words bon meaning ‘good’ and feu meaning ‘fire’. According to Wikipedia, the word is a contraction of bone fire (cf. for example kostjor in Russian – from kost meaning ‘bone’). Apparently the name comes from a fire which was traditionally used to burn bones. The Online Etymology Dictionary tells me the word appeared (in English at least) as banefire around the year 1483.

Perhaps it suggests more of a purging of the old and welcoming of the new? Whatever the origin of the word bonfire, the month of June will see people around the world coming together in the warm glow as part of their local tradition. I must get myself to Rio!

Have you come across the acronyms lol (laugh out loud) or brb (be right back) from texting or instant messaging? Perhaps you have lazily texted or typed C u 2mrw (see you tomorrow)? Are you a fan of the hugely popular Lol Cats (to the left) with their sometimes strange but often hilarious captioning language? Welcome to Leet speak.

The dynamic sublanguage Leet (from ‘elite’) has been widely used on the internet and as part of informal electronic communication for over ten years, and is now a fixed part of popular internet culture and language. Basic Leet speak replaces letters with various combinations of predominantly numeric characters. So, Leet becomes 1337 or 133t. Leet speak would become 1337 5p33k. 7#15 B1()& r00xor means ‘this blog rocks (is fantastic).’ l33t embraces abbreviation, acronyms, misspellings and typos (see the fat cat image), synonyms, punctuations marks, phonetic combinations and homographic substitution (in which similar looking letters, punctuation marks or graphics represent the correct letter). Other popular examples of 1337 include, warez (plural shortening of ‘software’), n00b (‘newbie’ or ‘rookie’), haxor (‘hacker’).

The original aim of Leet speak in the 1980s was to use alternate characters to get past restrictive text editors (which I will look at in the next post), but today, Leet speak is used primarily to reduce the number of keystrokes used in various forms of communication.

afk brb bio, is much quicker to type than its intended meaning, ‘I am away from keyboard, will be right back, I am going to the toilet’.

You are all imagining the expression on the faces of your English teachers, right? At worst, Leet was seen as a corrupt, exclusionary form of the English language and a manifestation of adolescent male attitudes of competition. Apparently, throughout human existence, males have demonstrated their mating fitness by inventing and displaying new and innovative communication forms.

Lol u r n00b – I am laughing at you newbie (rookie).

I am not sure about the above, I generally show my mating fitness by beating my chest and winking. Anyway, those who didn’t use Leet, saw it, at best, as a technique for keeping parents in the dark and, at worst, as evidence that their children were involved in nefarious, illegal activities! The youthful howls of consternation at these views are I think largely justified, as most users will tell you Leet speak is used primarily to reduce keystrokes.

Despite these reservations, Leet’s expansion into popular youth culture could not be ignored. Microsoft published a rather patronizing Leet primer for parents, which missed the main reason for the popularity of the sublanguage  and seemed to be aimed at determining whether ‘children’ were involved in illegal online activities. A BBC explanation of leet speak, in 2002, was less alarmist and now, in 2009, it appears as though Leet speak is here to stay. Some slang terms made popular by Leet speak, such as lol and owned (pwned, meaning to dominate or reduce one’s status) produce Google search results in the hundreds of millions. In the next post I will look at how Leet speak is spreading across languages.

Leet speak has developed from an obscure communication system into a cultural phenomenon, widely and increasingly used in online games, chat rooms, text messaging, instant messaging, websites and wider electronic communication. I am certainly guilty of the occasional unbecoming abbreviation or (gasp!) leaving out the occasional vowel, especially when texting or trying to type on a small keypad. Did you know the ancient Egyptians wrote their hieroglyphs without vowels and we can still understand them? I am sure the 140 character limit for Twitter tweets are also driving the masses to Leet.

Despite sometimes being deliberately abstruse and celebrating incorrectness, Leet speak is a highly dynamic communication medium. While differing in practitioners and ethos, one nevertheless recalls the spirit of literary Dada.

I shall … dispense with conventional language … I don’t want words that other people have invented … I let the vowels fool around … Words emerge, shoulders of words, legs, arms, hands of words. Au, oi, uh. One shouldn’t let too many words out … a chance to get rid of all the filth that clings to this accursed language … I want the word where it ends and begins. Dada is the heart of words … Why can’t a tree be called Pluplusch … The word, gentlemen, is a public concern of the first importance.
(Hugo Ball, Dada Manifesto, 1916)

The next post looks at the origins of Leet speak and some popular Leet terms. It is interesting how we know more about English etymology from Greek and Latin 2000 years ago than we do about some Leet speak terms from 20 years ago!

See part 2 of this post here.