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【听力】Sexism and the English Language

Economist  英文巴士  Yesterday

Sexism and English Language

来自英文巴士

02:5803:27

NB: This may not be a word-for-word transcript.

Sexism and the English Language

Women and men face double standards. No, I don’t mean just the gender pay gap, I’m also talking about the different words we use to describe men and women with the same characteristics.

While he is described as charismatic, she’s often described as bubbly or vivacious. You wouldn’t describe him as an airhead, he’s just simple. She’s an airhead. She’s bossy. He’s assertive. Women are far more likely than men to be described as gossiping. If you don’t believe me, after this film, try a Google images search for gossip.

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Unlike French, German, Spanish, Polish, practically any other European language, English doesn’t have gender inherent in most of its words. But some of those words become gendered anyway when we choose different words to describe men and women. Feisty is a classic example. It’s rare to hear a man described as feisty. Sure, you could hear about a feisty boxer, but it’s a lot more likely to describe a flyweight than a heavyweight. That’s why some women hear feisty as applying a kind of figurative or literal smallness in them and hence a note of condescension.

Academics from the University of Illinois and the University of California analyzed over 100,000 works of fiction written between 1800 and 2010. They identified words connecting to male or female characters and the actions they performed. The study showed that the word house used to be a strongly male term in the 1800s. House was associated with the landed gentry in Victorian era. But as the 20th century wore on, house became a slightly more female term associated with domesticity.

The writer Ben Blatt found that the verbs most associated with the pronoun she in classic fiction are: shivered, wept, murmured, screamed, and married. The most commonly associated with he are: muttered, grinned, shouted, chuckled, and killed.

An algorithm used by those academics who studied house tries to determine a character’s gender based only on the language used in descriptions and dialogue. These predictions were right 75% of the time for books written around 1800 but that falls to just about 65% of the time in books written around 2000. In other words, the vocabulary used to describe women and men is becoming more blurred. So the gender stereotypes like feisty are less common than they used to be.

Nearly all words have different shades of meaning. While the speaker intends the positive one, the hearer often hears the negative one. And that’s a good reason to avoid compliments that convey a note of surprise.

Lane, you are so articulate.

Really?

Scouring your mind for a vocative language isn’t easy, but working hard to be original and to avoid giving unwanted offense can only be a good thing.