Social aspects of derogation of women terms (original) (raw)
It is a truism to say that while communicating with others we are mostly unaware of the history of our language, not to mention any historical semantic changes of the vocabulary we are employing in our daily communication. However, it does not seem to matter much since one of the most significant functions of language is to communicate ideas. In a situation when both the addresser and addressee perceive things similarly it is not their concern that, say, a word which is now, for instance, both female-specific and opprobrious was once non-gender specific and non-abusive. Another function of human language, except communication, is to express shared assumptions and transmit implicit values and behavioural models to those who use it. Hence, as a powerful conceptual force language is a transmitter of society's deep biases and provides a means of conditioning our thoughts. Let us refer at this point to Mills (1989:xi) who provides a down-to-earth yet illustrative example of ordinary words for a female person such as woman and girl. When the words acquire the additional commonly understood meanings of 'mistress' and 'prostitute', as they -in fact -did in the history of English, an attitude towards women held by some members of society becomes -somewhat naturally -part of the experience of all that society's members. Miller and Swift (1976:50) in their Words and Women provide further evidence saying that when parents or teachers tell a boy not to cry because it is far from being manly or praise a girl for her feminine way of dressing, they are simply using the words manly and feminine to reinforce the categories our culture has assigned to males and females. Inevitably, in such situations language immediately becomes the expression of current societal values and a part of culture. As Bynon (1983) accentuates:
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