Linguistic sexism

 THOUGHT OF THE DAY:     
"It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs." - Thomas Hardy, from Far from the Madding Crowd

Languages have sexist aspects, which often can and should be correct, such as changing "workmen's compensation" to "workers' compensation" or removing words like "actress" and "lioness." Are these men's fault, though?  It seems to me it is a cultural attitude expressed generally.

That is a very good distinction: the structure of a language and the culture that uses it are not the same thing.

Hardy’s line is interesting because it does not necessarily accuse individual men of deliberately designing English to exclude women. English, like most languages, evolved over centuries through the speech of whole societies, and those societies often had male-dominated institutions. The language reflects that history. A language is more like a fossil record of social assumptions than a blueprint created by a committee.

Take “workmen’s compensation.” The word “men” there originally functioned in English as a generic term for humans in many contexts (“mankind,” “chairman,” “manpower”). But as women entered professions and public life in greater numbers, the old generic usage became less neutral in practice because people naturally hear “men” as referring to males. Changing it to “workers’ compensation” is not really blaming the people who coined the earlier phrase; it is updating language because the social context changed.

The same applies to words like “actress” and “lioness.” There is a difference between a word marking a meaningful biological distinction (“mare,” “doe,” “hen”) and one that unnecessarily marks gender in a profession. “Actress” was not originally an insult; it was simply the feminine form of “actor,” just as “waitress” and “hostess” developed that way. But once society came to view acting as a profession rather than a novelty for women, the separate term could imply that the “normal” category was male and the female version was an exception.

Where the debate gets more complicated is that not every gendered feature of language has the same significance. Some languages have grammatical gender where every noun is classified as masculine, feminine, or neuter, even when there is no connection to biological sex. Others use masculine plural forms as the default. Whether those features shape thought, or merely reflect thought, is still debated among linguists.

I think your phrase “a cultural attitude expressed generally” gets close to what many historians and linguists would say. The people who used these terms were usually operating within the assumptions of their time, just as we all do. A culture creates language, and then language can reinforce parts of that culture. The interesting question is not usually “who is to blame?” but “does this wording still serve the society we now have?”

Hardy himself is an interesting example. He was not writing as a modern feminist, but he was often remarkably sensitive to the constraints placed on women by Victorian society. That quotation from Far from the Madding Crowd is less a complaint about vocabulary than an observation that women’s experiences were often interpreted through institutions, literature, and customs largely shaped by men.

Although the point is often made that French gender is grammar, not sex, the fact remains that male things get masculine gender and female things get feminine gender.

That is a fair refinement. Linguists often emphasize that languages are equally capable of expressing anything humans need to express, but that does not mean they are equally convenient for every purpose. “No language is better” is often intended as a statement about human cognitive equality, not as a claim that every feature of every language is equally efficient.

Different languages make different tradeoffs. English, for example, is very economical when it comes to many everyday constructions. The lack of adjective agreement, the absence of noun cases, and the single second-person pronoun make ordinary sentences relatively simple to assemble. But English can become cumbersome when it needs distinctions that other languages encode automatically.

Japanese is a good example in the opposite direction: it can often omit subjects because context supplies them, producing very compact conversations. But that same feature can make translation into English require adding information that was left implicit.

German can pack complex ideas into compounds very efficiently: a single long compound noun can express what English might need a phrase to explain. German also has grammatical structures that allow relationships between words to be marked precisely. The cost is that the speaker has more grammatical machinery to manage.

Russian and other highly inflected languages can move words around more freely because endings show grammatical roles. English depends more heavily on word order. That flexibility can be useful in poetry and emphasis, but it comes with the cost of learning and remembering case endings.

So there is a real sense in which languages have strengths and weaknesses. A language might be “better” for a particular task: a legal document requiring explicit distinctions, a poem seeking ambiguity, a technical manual seeking compactness, or a casual conversation seeking ease.

The deeper point is that languages are not designed systems. They are accumulated solutions to problems faced by communities over centuries. They inherit efficiencies, inefficiencies, beautiful features, and awkward leftovers. English’s flexible pronouns are a good example: losing grammatical distinctions made some things easier, while making other things require extra words. The gains and losses are scattered throughout the system rather than adding up to a simple ranking.

Rather than cases (necessarily restricted to a limited list) or word order (clearly highly restrictive), I think I prefer extensive use of prepositions.

That preference makes a lot of sense, and it points to a real difference in how languages organize information.

Prepositions are a very flexible tool because they let a language build relationships almost as needed rather than relying only on a fixed inventory of endings. English can say:

    “the book on the table”

    “the book under the table”

    “the book beside the table”

    “the book because of the table” (odd, but grammatically possible)

    “the book with the red cover”

The speaker can combine familiar pieces in a productive way. This is one reason English is so good at creating precise distinctions through small additions.

Case systems, by contrast, are often elegant but limited. Latin, for example, had cases for functions such as subject, direct object, possession, and indirect object. But if a speaker wanted to express a more nuanced relationship, the language often needed a preposition anyway. Modern German still has cases, but it also uses many prepositions because cases alone do not cover everything.

Word order has its own tradeoff. English relies heavily on it:

    “The dog chased the cat”
    “The cat chased the dog”

The order tells us who did what. A language with more case marking can rearrange words for emphasis or style because the endings carry the grammatical information. That is useful, but the listener must process those endings.

English prepositions also have the advantage of being easy to expand. New usages develop naturally: “out of,” “up to,” “because of,” “according to,” “in terms of,” “with respect to.” They form a kind of toolkit for fine distinctions.

The downside is that English prepositions can be maddeningly idiomatic. A learner has to memorize that one is “interested in,” “good at,” “depend on,” “responsible for,” and so forth. A case-ending language may encode some of those relationships more systematically.

So there is a genuine philosophical choice: do you prefer a language where relationships are expressed by a relatively open-ended set of words, or one where a smaller set of grammatical mechanisms handles many relationships automatically? English favors the former. It is a bit like having a large toolbox of labeled parts rather than a machine with many built-in gears.

Can be maddeningly idiomatic?  They are maidenly idiomatic!

Touché. That is a delightfully English joke — and it actually demonstrates the very thing we were discussing.

English prepositions are not merely “maddeningly idiomatic”; they are magnificently idiomatic too. They are small, ordinary words that have accumulated layers of meaning through centuries of use. A preposition like up can mean physical movement (“walk up the hill”), completion (“use up the supply”), increase (“prices went up”), improvement (“cheer up”), or even disappearance (“the plane went up,” depending on context).

And your “maidenly” twist works because English is so comfortable with playful ambiguity. The language has an enormous supply of words and expressions that have drifted far from their literal origins. “Maidenly” normally means “like a maiden,” but placed beside “idiomatic” it creates a mock-correction that sounds almost plausible for a moment.

English owes much of this flexibility to its history. It is a Germanic language that absorbed a huge amount of French and Latin vocabulary after the Norman Conquest, then continued borrowing and reshaping words from many other languages. The result is a language with a very large vocabulary and many overlapping ways to express an idea.

The same flexibility that lets English produce endless puns also produces those infamous phrases that confuse learners:

    “look up a word” versus “look up to someone”

    “take off a jacket” versus “take off successfully”

    “run out of time” versus “run out the door”

The little words are doing a tremendous amount of work. They are almost invisible when you are a native speaker, but they carry a surprising amount of the architecture of the sentence.

So yes — perhaps “maddeningly idiomatic” was only half the story. “Maidenly idiomatic” is certainly more memorable. 🙂