The Macmillan Dictionary got a mention in The Guardian yesterday, when Jane Martinson pondered the use of the word simper. A fellow journalist (male) had tweeted about a lawyer (female) ‘simpering’ at a witness (male) in the ongoing Leveson Inquiry. (The inquiry was set up in the wake of revelations that News International journalists had obtained stories by hacking into the phones of celebrities, politicians, and crime victims.) ‘Can anyone remember,’ she wondered,  ‘the last time a man was accused of “simpering”?’

She’s right. Corpus evidence suggests that simper is used three or four times as often about girls and women as about boys or men. Not only that, where the word is used about men, there’s sometimes an implication that they are not ‘real’ men (that’s why they simper): we hear from an American writer about ‘Simpering Frenchman Jacques Chirac’ (apologies to our French readers), and there are several cases of gay men described as simpering too. This happens a lot: the only people who flounce in and out of rooms are women (overwhelmingly), and gay men (occasionally) – but never heterosexual men. (I’m just reporting what the data tells us, so don’t shoot the messenger.)

As always, the co-text is instructive: simper appears with adverbs like flirtatiously, seductively, or sweetly, while other verbs found in the vicinity include fawn, pout, blush, and giggle – all words associated (whether we like it or not) with women. This example from the corpus gives a good flavour of how simper is typically used:

She preferred male company … and had no time for giggling, simpering girls who cared for nothing but gossip and the price of hair ribbon.

As Jane Martinson pointed out, the example given in the Macmillan entry has a female subject (She spoke in a simpering tone), and this takes us back to an issue we discussed last year, during Gender English month: should dictionary editors ignore the evidence and show a man in the example (as a way of combating gender stereotypes), or do we record what we find? No easy answers here, though we have to balance our gender-neutral instincts with a description of usage that’s true to the data.

Much has been written about words that blatantly insult women: slut, harpy, bitch and the like. But simper belongs to a more interesting category – words which belittle women, but which do it just subtly enough that (some) men think they can get away with it. Something similar is happening with feisty, another ‘suspect’ word mentioned by Martinson. Again, the data backs her up: feisty is overwhelmingly used about women, and the nouns it frequently modifies include heroine, redhead, tomboy (=honorary male), lady, gal, and even filly. On the surface, it conveys admiration – but this is qualified by the implication that ‘She did well – considering she’s only a woman’.

There is much more to be said on this subject. A man who is quiet and reserved, for example, tends to be described as taciturn – a word rarely applied to women – or even ‘the strong silent type’: both positive descriptions. A woman of the same type is just quiet, and probably also shy or even mousy. Or even simpering … Well, maybe we’ll come back to this another day. Oh, and thanks to Jane Martinson, too, for adding another word (twarrumph) to our growing collection of Twitter-inspired vocabulary.

Gender & English has proven to be a popular topic so we’ve decided to continue the discussion for another week before switching to a new area (more on that next week). English teacher, Research Fellow and blogger Dan Clayton returns with a guest post on the differences between male and female communication.

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“It has long been known that men and women talk differently when conversing with members of the opposite sex” claims John L. Locke in a blog post about his new book Duels and Duets: Why Men and Women Talk So Differently. And it’s a pretty bold claim, not least because it’s wrong.

Linguists, psychologists and now evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists have all contributed to the debate about linguistic differences between the sexes. Some have pointed to upbringing as a reason for differences (boys being socialised into competition, girls into collaboration), some to sexist hierarchies keeping women in artificially less powerful positions both socially and linguistically, while others have argued that evolution has equipped us differently.

So far so hmm … but while these theories provide food for thought (and have certainly helped the writers John Gray, Deborah Tannen and Alan and Barbara Pease put food on the table), when it comes down to the actual data – i.e. transcripts of spoken conversations between women and men – the linguistic evidence for differences between the sexes is actually very slight.

Talking to The Guardian before her own (highly recommended) book, The Myth of Mars and Venus was released, the linguist Deborah Cameron described the statistical difference between the amount women and men talked as about as significant as “a gnat’s fart”.

Cameron surveyed a huge range of research into conversation among and between men and women, and found that very little of it indicated any significant difference between how women and men used (for example) more direct or indirect forms of language, spoke more or fewer words, or competed with each other or collaborated.

Instead, she highlighted three main problems with generalised assertions about gender differences in language: that the situation we are in and the type of activity we are generally engaged in is hugely important to our language style; that power and status are a big influence on conversational behaviour – much more so than gender; that our language choices are exactly that: a choice, not something hard-wired into us, but something we choose to project as part of our individual and group identities. And it’s this last argument that really clashes with Locke’s evolutionary model, which makes a direct link between our evolutionary histories and our preferred language styles.

In his new book, Locke argues that men and women “talk differently because our male and female ancestors followed different evolutionary paths”. Locke sees male verbal behaviour as being characterised by ritualised displays of aggression and power, which are a less risky way of “fighting” with another man than actually picking up a club and boshing him over the head. He points to anthropological evidence that cultures all over the world show evidence of such rituals – flyting in Anglo-Saxon times, drum duels, poetic face-offs – and if it all sounds a bit like 8 Mile or is getting all 2Pac and Biggie then perhaps that’s because they are natural heirs to the flyting throne.

But if this were the case we would expect to find no examples of females exhibiting the same behaviour and that surely isn’t the case. In Papua New Guinea, the ritual known as “kros” is carried out by women against men. It’s a ritualised performance of quite foul-mouthed abuse, which isn’t really suitable for a family audience (but which you can read more about here). And you don’t have to go far to find plenty of women engaging in ritual performances of abuse directed at men in poems, raps, songs or pretty much any British regional accent to know that such behaviour isn’t the sole preserve of men.

It’s not just linguists who dispute Locke’s evolutionary model; psychiatrists do too. In a review of Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender, Professor Robert Plomin from the Institute of Psychiatry in London, points out a major frustration with how people treat gender differences:

If you map the distribution of scores for verbal skills of boys and of girls you get two graphs that overlap so much you would need a very fine pencil indeed to show the difference between them. Yet people ignore this huge similarity between boys and girls and instead exaggerate wildly the tiny difference between them. It drives me wild.

What’s odd is that even after the linguistic evidence has been weighed up, there’s still a tendency for many of us to focus on difference rather than similarities. Perhaps it’s natural: we’re often quicker to see things that stand out rather than what blends in. Perhaps, as Cameron suggests in her book, in a time of flux and rapidly shifting gender roles, people look for certainties about who they are and how they should define themselves. Perhaps it’s evolution … but I suspect not.

Gender English month continues with a guest post by Aneta Naumoska, a Lector of Contemporary English Language at the “Blaze Koneski” Faculty of Philology in Skopje, Macedonia. Aneta’s first book, Gender Marking in the English Language, was published in December 2010. Her particular interests lie in the field of Sociolinguistics. She is also an avid Twitterer (@ELTane).

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The strict feminist ideals of revolutionizing the so-called masculine English language have been looked upon by some in a favorable way, while others simply disagree by complaining that such an immense language change will only bring about “sloppy” euphemisms. As Michiko Kakutani has noted (1):

Certainly no decent person can quarrel with the underlying impulse behind political correctness: a vision of a more just, inclusive society in which racism, sexism and prejudice of all sorts have been erased. But the methods and fervor of the self-appointed language police can lead to a rigid orthodoxy – and unintentional self-parody – opening the movement to the scorn of conservative opponents and the mockery of cartoonists and late-night television hosts.

Nonetheless, there have been a multitude of attempts (around 80) by grammarians over the past 200 years to coin new words that will free women from their position of being lexically obscure, yet maintain grammatical competence. Many have advocated gender-free – or epicene – pronouns (such as ne, ter, thon, heer, hiser, en, et, ip), which have one form to indicate either sex, but without any success, which is the reason why they were quickly labeled “the words that failed.” On this topic, Dennis Baron states that “epicene pronouns are not transparent, unambiguous, or easy to use; they are phonetically and visually awkward; and they are the creations of a feminist conspiracy” (2).

Prescriptivists find the gender-specific pronoun he to violate the rules of pronoun agreement (hence the emergence of epicene pronouns), and they have the same objection to the singular they used as a replacement for the generic masculine or the third person singular it. Employing a plural pronoun to refer to both singular definite and indefinite nouns (everyone, somebody, anybody) is a clear example of semantic agreement, but not grammatical agreement. Jespersen and Quirk are both tolerant on this issue, but accept the existence of singular they only for informal constructions.

In the second half of the 20th century, The Second Barnhart Dictionary of New English listed over 40 outrageous examples of unlikely replacements for several everyday terms: e.g.:

amen-aperson, freshman-freshperson, history-herstory, human-huperson, manhole-personhole, manipulating-personipulating, manslaughter-personslaughter, manners-personners, mantle-persontle, nomenclature-nopersonclature, sportsmanship-sportsoneship, etc.

Miller and Swift have given quite an attention-grabbing solution (3):

Searching the roots of Western civilization for a word to call this new species of man and woman, someone might come up with gen, as in genesis and generic. Like the words deer and bison, gen would be both plural and singular. Like progenitor, progeny and generation, it would convey continuity. Gen would express the warmth and generalized sexuality of generous, gentle and genuine; the specific sexuality of genital and genetic. In the new family of gen, girls and boys would grow to genhood, and to speak of genkind would be to include all the people of the earth.

What do you think? Are these solutions for a gender-free English language appealing? Or are they simply over the top and unrealistic?

Notes

1 Goshgarian, Gary. Exploring Language, 7th ed. 1995. New York: Harper Collins College Publishers
2 Baron, Dennis. Grammar and Gender. 1986. New Haven: Yale University Press
3 in Goshgarian, 1995

In a recent post about the role of dictionaries in matters of language and gender, Michael Rundell wrote that they “shouldn’t take sides in any area of language use” but that “in some cases this is unavoidable”.

Dictionaries record how language is used, so they can’t simply ignore sexist and discriminatory usages – or new terms that supersede them – no matter how objectionable some people might find them. But by tagging words and adding usage notes, dictionaries can point out controversies, indicate that a word is non-standard or politically incorrect, and trust to readers’ judgement.

For example, the Macmillan Dictionary definition of fireman makes explicit mention of its masculine gender – lest it be thought the default, as it once was. Not so long ago, fireman and air hostess would have been common generic terms for people in certain lines of work. Nowadays, gender-neutral options like firefighter and flight attendant are increasingly preferred.

Before an expression falls into disuse and another takes its place, there can be a period of tension over their respective advantages and acceptability. As people debate such questions, they seek guidance from authoritative sources like dictionaries, which track meanings as they shift and drift and settle anew. Lexicographers’ responsibility in this regard is illustrated in a wry cartoon by Hans Stengel.

One of the arguments against gender-biased terms like fireman and chairman is that they suggest that these roles – and the power and bravery and other virtues associated with them – are the exclusive or particular preserve of men. Sexist terminology often takes the male as norm, the female as derivation or deviation, and men have long considered themselves the quintessential type: Joe Public as “modern man”, putting in man-hours with his manpower.

Men’s longstanding cultural dominance may be seen in the tendency for woman-related words to take on negative connotations far more than do man-related words; Michael’s article mentions several. “Man-words” may be jocular or daft but they are rarely abusive. Little wonder that exclusively female coinages (like do-it-herselfer, girlcott, and femivore) often embody “ideas of empowerment”, as Kerry Maxwell notes in her MED Magazine article on women and new words.

The Columbia Guide to Standard American Usage says,

Society’s attitude toward women, not lists of new taboos, will continue to do the most to set the pace of change.

Dictionaries follow the people’s lead. English belongs to no one and to everyone, and whoever uses it gets to play a part in its constant evolution.

The recent riots in England led to some debate over language, most notably over what to call the people rioting. The BBC was criticised for continuing to use the word protesters for a few days after the term had become inappropriate. The broadcaster later admitted it had made a mistake; Fran Unsworth, BBC News head of newsgathering, added:

We try not to be too prescriptive, but yes we have said actually that they’re not protesters they’re clearly rioters and looters. They are more descriptive terms and we should try and be as accurately descriptive as we can be.

Though the BBC went out of its way to avoid terms that could be considered judgemental, other media outlets and commentators were less cautious. All sorts of words were used to refer to the rioters – looters, thieves, criminals, hooligans, thugs, yobs, idiots, cretins, scum, terrorists, feral underclass. A few of these are, to use Unsworth’s phrase, accurately descriptive; others are loaded with prejudice or carry a nasty subtext.

Mark Liberman at Language Log used a memorable metaphor in a post about flash mobs: that word meanings “pick up associations like barnacles”. People share many of these associations but they also bring their own to the mix. This idiosyncrasy, combined with people’s different value systems, means the perceived accuracy and acceptability of a term can vary greatly from person to person.

The riots also brought mainstream media attention to urban slang, such as bally for balaclava, feds for police (a clear borrowing from American English), and bare for lots of or very, as in “bare feds” or “bare dangerous”. Note that this sense of bare isn’t new – it has multiple entries in the Urban Dictionary dating from 2003, and is presumably older than that.

Another political aspect of the language used in reference to the riots concerns geography. The BBC initially called the riots “UK riots”, but after receiving complaints from  residents of Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, it switched to “England riots”.

The Telegraph, in its report of this change, calls the BBC representative a spokesman. We are left in little or no doubt about his gender. I wonder if it had been a woman, would the newspaper have referred to her as a spokeswoman or as a spokesperson? Why not use spokesperson regardless, unless the gender is somehow relevant to the report?

You can find out more about the relationship between gender and language on this page.

In a recent comment, Stan mentioned a newpaper headline about a ‘missing girl’ who was in fact a 30-year-old woman. As he pointed out, ‘there’s no way “missing boy” would have been used to describe a man of 30’ – and this is more or less the message given in the Macmillan Dictionary’s entry for girl. It ends with a note headed ‘Avoiding Offence’, whose advice includes this:

Avoid using girl if it would seem wrong to use boy about a young man of the same age.

And if you look at the definitions in this entry, you’ll see that most include warnings about potentially offensive uses. All of which shows what a minefield this area of language can be. So what can – or should – dictionaries do about language and gender?

It’s a fundamental principle of lexicography that the dictionary’s role is to explain what words mean by observing how people use them – not to make pronouncements about what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. It follows that dictionaries shouldn’t take sides in any area of language use, but in some cases this is unavoidable. Back in the 1980s, I had the job of editing a dictionary to produce a second edition, and I noticed that the first edition included this definition of apartheid (this was at a time when the apartheid system was still in full force):

the keeping separate of races of different colours in one country, especially of Europeans and non-Europeans in South Africa

We changed this to:

in South Africa, the system established by the government of keeping different races separate, especially so as to give advantage to white people

At first sight, the original definition looks more ‘neutral’: it describes the policy, without imputing any motive to those who operated it. But at that time apartheid was a highly contentious issue, and a definition which failed to mention the oppressive nature of apartheid could be seen as endorsing it.

With issues of gender, we face similar dilemmas. As cultural artefacts, dictionaries inevitably reflect the norms of their societies and their times. The original (1969) edition of the American Heritage Dictionary defines a plumber as ‘a workman who installs and repairs pipes and plumbing’, and most older dictionaries show a pervasive male bias. On the other hand, if we try too hard to redress this, we could be accused of tokenism or of manipulating the language. It’s a fact, for example, that corpus evidence shows that verbs like nag, gossip and chatter are mainly used with women as subjects, but should this be reflected in the example sentences we choose for the dictionary – or does that just perpetuate negative stereotypes?

Then there is the question of how to define words like termagant, harridan, virago, or shrew. It’s well-known that there are far more words like this for women than for men, and arguably most were invented by men for the purpose of belittling, insulting, or marginalising women. As you’ll see in our definition for harpy, there are plenty of warnings about the effects words like this may produce in the listener or reader. This brings us back to our entry for girl, which also carries warnings about some uses which may cause offence. On the whole, dictionaries do make an effort to portray women (whether in definitions or example sentences) in positive roles, and at Macmillan, our style guide for editors contains advice on avoiding gender bias. This could be seen as a form of ‘language engineering’ – of interfering with the objective data in order to promote a particular view. But we would argue that a dictionary aimed mainly at learners needs to inform its users (whose own cultures may be very different) not only what words mean, but what sensitivities are associated with them.

August is dedicated to gender English here on the blog, and we kick off another month of lively discussion with a post by regular guest blogger Stan Carey on the topic of gender and pronouns.

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English has long had trouble with gender and pronouns. The lack of a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun has inspired many novel suggestions, none of which has ever been broadly adopted. When a pronoun is needed to refer to subjects of unspecified gender (e.g., “If a visitor wants information, ___ should enquire inside), or to indefinite pronouns (e.g., “Everyone should treat ___self to a good night’s sleep”), there is no solution that will satisfy everyone.

Plural pronouns (they, them, their, themselves) have been used for centuries to refer to singular antecedents, not only in informal speech but in classic literature. This raises the hackles of sticklers, though, who protest that it contravenes grammatical concord. The influence of Google+ should give singular they a boost, but Facebook ran into difficulty here. Themself – which centuries ago was used where we now use themselves – is occasionally resorted to, but it is a non-standard form.

Using masculine pronouns by default is now rightly considered to be chauvinist. There is much social value in rejecting sexist language. Combinations like s/he and he or she occasionally suffice, but they can be awkward and annoying. Other options include alternating between masculine and feminine terms; making the antecedent plural (“If visitors want information, they should enquire inside”); and using plural pronouns (“We should all treat ourselves to a good night’s sleep”).

The Egalia pre-school in Sweden has taken some unusual steps as part of a progressive approach to gender equality. Pronouns that are marked by gender, like han and hon – Swedish he and she – are avoided; the non-standard hen, which means she or he, is used instead. (Hen may have been inspired by the Finnish common-gender pronoun hän.) Lotta Rajalin, director of Egalia, says they use it

when a doctor, police, electrician or plumber or such is coming to the kindergarten … Then the children can imagine both a man or a woman. This widens their view.

Whether the Egalia school’s experimental MO is worth the trouble remains to be seen. Such attempts to engineer language might seem negligible or ill-advised, but they at least help raise awareness of bias and discrimination in language that could otherwise often go unnoticed. What do you think – will the strategy help counter gender stereotypes, or is it a pointless exercise in excessive political correctness?

What’s your view on gender in language, and how it affects learning? English stands out from other European languages by not have gendered nouns, so the city is not feminine as it is in, say French and Spanish (la cité / la ciudad), and nor is the country masculine (le pays / el país).

We tend to think that not having to bother with these elements makes it easier for learners of English, but does it? If your worldview (built upon your mother tongue) includes genders for things, that presumably also means that those things which share a grammatical gender also, at some level in your mind, share certain characteristics. So does a language without those markers somehow seem a bit ‘black and white’, and lacking in perspective? Does it actually make it harder for learners not having that added dimension to deal with – what do you think?

Stan Carey’s post yesterday was a nice reminder of how a word or phrase can suddenly gain widespread currency simply as a result of fashion. And as with any trend, the kudos gained by the user declines in inverse proportion to the number of users – so that in the end the phrase becomes an overused cliché which discerning speakers avoid because they don’t want to sound like everyone else. So fit for purpose may already have passed its peak. As Stan observed, it is too recent to be found in older corpora. The British National Corpus (collected in the early 1990s) has only two examples of the phrase, where it is used in its original legal sense, referring to items sold to the public: these must – under the UK’s Sale of Goods Act – be ‘fit for purpose’. But the big corpus we use now at Macmillan Dictionaries has 1726 hits for this expression, and most refer to organizations, systems, and even people.

This raises questions about the reliability of our language data – the raw materials from which we make the dictionary – in cases where language is changing fast. For the last 25 years or so, linguists and lexicographers have been using corpus data to learn about the behaviour of words and the way the language system works. But an exciting new research area is opening up, based not on conventional corpora, but on Twitter feeds.

These have the advantage of providing high volumes of very up-to-date examples of language in use. Some of this data is used for what is known as ‘sentiment analysis’, as a way of discovering people’s attitudes on various topics, and tweets have even been used (with some success) to predict the movement of the stock market.  But this material can be used for linguistic research too. One interesting project is looking at differences in language use between men and women. By analysing millions of Twitter messages where the writer can be reliably categorised as male or female, the researchers are able to compare the way particular words or phrases are used. They have produced a website where you can key in words and compare their frequency according to the gender of the writer. Try looking, for example, at these four words of enthusiastic approval, to see which are used more by women and which are favoured by men: lovely, great, brilliant, fabulous.

The ‘detailed query’ function also lets you see how words typically combine. The adjective gorgeous, for example, is used almost three times as often by women as by men – but when men do use it, the nouns it most often modifies are woman and girl, whereas women tend to use gorgeous to describe things like dresses, pictures, and views. I’m not sure what to make of that, but I expect someone will have a theory!

In the English class, teachers can make use of internet search engines to answer students’ linguistic queries such as:

“Which is more common – look after yourself or take care of yourself?”

In the following pie chart, figures refer to the number of Google hits obtained by running a web search of these two items:

Of course, the Internet was never designed for language investigation and so results like these should be taken with a pinch of salt (i.e. should not be taken too seriously). Apart from the problem of underrepresented genres and registers (e.g. spoken English, literary English, etc), there is also the problem of knowing exactly what type of language the Internet does consist of (i.e. chat room English, blogging English, spam, IT English, pornographic English, etc) and in what proportions.

Even if we did have an accurate linguistic breakdown of the World Wide Web, we couldn’t be sure which parts the search engines are reaching. And why do results for any given search vary from day to day or even minute to minute?

And then there are what Michael Rundell refers to as ‘distractors’. His example was the book, Bored of the rings. Its prominent online presence would give an unfair advantage to the collocation bored of if we wanted to compare its frequency with that of bored with.

But despite all of these problems, the universal familiarity of Google makes it a fun tool for learners to compare frequencies of words, collocations and other lexical items. As a way of introducing my own students to the corpus principle, I recently made the following clip.

Although I can’t imagine anyone taking this clip too seriously, I now think that it could have been better.

Let’s start with the sentences which are marked by the subject pronouns he and she:

“He talks nonsense”     2,500 Google hits
“She talks nonsense”   619 Google hits

“He likes dogs”               10,800 Google Hits
“She likes dogs”             2,980 Google Hits

In both of these examples, the ratio of he to she sentences is of the order 4:1. But the interesting thing is not that he talks 4 times more nonsense than she does. Neither is it that he likes dogs 4 times more than she does. The interesting thing is that he is represented 4 times more than she is on the internet, at least according to the results obtained by Google:

he       3,820 million Google hits
she     1,080 million Google hits

This gender disparity is also observable on the British National Corpus. A simple search gives the following frequencies:

he       640,736 results
she     352,872 results

So perhaps if we want to find corpus sex differences using subject pronouns as markers, it would be an idea to multiply the results of she sentences by 4 when using Google and by 2 when using the BNC.

The same imbalance applies to the possessive markers his and her

The problem with these corpus searches, however, is that as well as being possessive markers, her is also an object pronoun and his is also a possessive pronoun:

However, the higher frequency of the male possessive marker is confirmed with a few searches of “his/her + noun” pairs:

So as with the subject pronoun markers, any searches involving possessive markers are destined to fail from the start.

But despite all this, the search results presented in the clip were never intended to be taken too seriously. Rather, the intention was:

1. To demonstrate the corpus principle to language learners.
2. To remind students that when dealing with language and life, things are not always black and white (some men have purses, some women have wallets).
3. To introduce students to one level of diversity in language (the gender level – women may use the adjective lovely more than men).