Sexist Language

Okay, I'm writing a paper on sexist language (not my idea), and I gotta say some feminists are crazy.

Now, don't get me wrong. I consider myself a feminist. I used to really throw people off in my English classes cause I'd start nearly every comment I made with "speaking as a feminist." I think it's funny how women feel like they have a special right to the term. But that is neither here nor there.

What gets me is how invasive the steps some feminists would like to take to correct the English language. But before I go too far, let give you a little history on feminism.

Feminism comes in three flavors (contrary to belief--most people seem to think it comes in two flavors: women who hate men and women who tolerate men...but this is horribly false).

Flavor 1: First Wave Feminism. First wave feminism was about overturning laws that held women back. This was when women fought to vote, when they fought to be able to own land etc.

Second Wave Feminism. This type of feminism took the next step and fought for equality with men. This sort of feminism went on for quite a while, and now we're supposed to be at...

Third Wave Feminism. This is a much more broad term (and some people even disagree over whether it exists). It is very general, basically, this sort of feminism is about exploring what it means to be a woman in all the different ways possible, it doesn't espouse values of all women (why it's very general) it tries to let women explore their own values, and then determine womanness from that.

Third Wave Feminism is considered the feminism of the new generation. It was a response to the lack of interest expressed by many young women to second wave feminism. This upcoming generation of women don't know what it was like before feminism started evening the playing field, so they sorta take it for granted (or so the argument goes), and as a result, they have come up with a new form to sort of appeal to the youth. This is the group that likes Alanis Morisette, Jewel, and anyone else that played at Lilith fair.

Anyway, the main issue is equality, and there is no denying that the English language has a strong male bias. But the question is whether that bias causes a problem, if it's worth correcting (or even correctable) and whether it even reflects sexist thought.

I mean, when I use "guys" to refer to all the people in the room I'm not thinking about referring to only the men. I am sort of annoyed with the idea of correcting an entrenched language. Sure, English changes all the time, but it's a natural process. If views toward women change, language will eventually follow suit, it doesn't require legislation.

There are some really ridiculous requests.

Some women want the word changed to womyn or wommin because they don't want the word "men" as part of "their" word.

I actually do agree with them regarding changing policeman to police officer...but police person just sounds stupid.

I don't want to have to call the founding fathers the founding people (they want this...even though all the founding father were men!)

They want to rewrite America the Beautiful so it changes from "And crown they good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea" to And crown thy good with communityhood, from sea to shining sea."

First off communityhood isn't even a word, and even if it was it's so ugly (not that many feminists have a problem with ugly (just kidding (sorta))).

While we're rewriting history and eviscerating the English language, we might as well clear up folk etymologies too. Folk etymology is when people assign meaning to a root word because of a similarity. For example, the word Bridegroom.

Bride groom has been shortened and we now say Bride for the woman, and groom for the man. But groom means serving boy or someone who takes care of horses. Why is this?

Well, the original word was brydguma, which basically meant bryd (bride) and guma (man). So the word meant bride's man. But around the 16th century (pretty sure on the year... I didn't look this up) guma stopped being used to mean man, and it was replaced with grome (which is a serving lad) because it sounded similar. So, we then shortened the word and now we got groom to mean guy marrying a girl when it means nothing of the sort.

But, we see bride and groom and we just cut it off and assume a meaning for groom....this happens all the time. And it is something that some misinformed feminists want to fix.

So what words can we fix? Well, I haven't got a list but I'm gonna see how creative I can be and come up with some.

Mendacious means dishonest. I think we need to make it peopledacious, or perhaps womandacious.

mendicant means relying on charitable donations and what not. Lets change this to womendicant (please no jokes on this one).

menstruate...nevermind.

mankind is peoplekind

mantra is now womantra or peopletra...recite that.

manta rays are now womanta rays. Watch out...they sting.

The praying mantis is the praying persontis.

Germanic is now Gerpersonic

Here is a nerd one....wolverine's claws are made out of adamantium. But now they're adapersontium.

humanitarian is now hupersonitarian.

Maniacal (crazy) is now womaniacal

Well, I could go on, and this is sorta fun, but I'm gonna head to class.

I'll write more to you guys later.