Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

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To give an example of what it might be like if we built language around women and female pleasure instead of man's, we might say "envelopment" instead. One of our culture’s least helpful pieces of advice is that women need to change the way they speak to sound less “like women” (or that queer people need to sound straighter, or that people of color need to sound whiter). When used with a rising, question-like intonation 'you know' does indeed connotate hesitancy or doubt ("It's not, you know, fair") but when spoken with a flat intonation ("It's not fair, you know") it does just the reverse.

Model and actress Amber Rose was one of the first people to conduct and take a lead for a SlutWalk for people of color. However, if used in a humorous way, slut may also favor sexual freedom and mark the shift from traditional gender roles in gay men. Linguists who specialize in the English vocabulary of "dirty talk: have determined that if you want to know something about our culture's mainstream attitudes toward sex--that it is penetrative by definition, that it's over as soon as the guy ejaculates, that men are horny pursuers while women are docile, undesiring objects--just look at the words we've come up with to describe it.In the nineteenth century, the word was used as a euphemism in place of bitch in the sense of a female dog. You know is not a filler word, but again women reaching out to build consensus amongst the group they're speaking in.

Linguist Amanda Montell grabs the reader by the shirtfront with this book, slapping them with a title that opens the eyes before inundating the mind with so much on the topic of the way English is used and the divide it creates amongst its users. While colloquial terms such as male slut or man whore are used in popular culture, they are usually used in a joking manner. Not a compliment, obviously, but it’s not clear whether he’s insulting her character or her housekeeping. There is also an incredibly embarrassing passage in which she and her brother agree that when they say "How are you? It was used to describe a woman as dirty, or refer to her as a prostitute, harlot, or immoral woman.Este libro de no-ficción ofrece una mirada feminista al uso cotidiano que le damos al inglés y explora los orígenes de tales usos. While there was an attempt to include some diverse perspectives, Montell didn't go nearly deep enough and missed the mark in several areas. I thoroughly enjoyed this analysis, as I could hear the society and linguistic walls falling faster than a ‘sky is falling’ Trump edict on immigration barriers. It instructed the reader on how to do better, regarding their own speech, and how to reclaim language for their own purposes and not to degrade others.

Out of the 220 terms ascribed to females and 20 terms ascribed to males, [4] all female terms are disapproving while some male terms signal approval or praise; these include stud, player, and man whore. I thought perhaps someone was objecting to the final scene, and that the word referred to Rose of Sharon’s actions, offering her breast to a dying man,” she said. So I’m asking people to think about what these words mean and how they can be used to shame other people.

That being said, my head hurts from all the computing I have done and will be doing to be better aware, particularly since my buddy reader will hold me accountable every single day!

And, I was pleased and relieved to see how many voices / experiences that were brought to the forefront (read: this isn't all about straight, cis, white ladies and gents). While Montell explores hypercorrection of some sentiments, things that people use when they want to correct what appears to be bad grammar but is actually just as incorrect on the other side, she shows how certain groups (namely middle- to lower-class women) find themselves scorned and ridiculed.Perhaps later, as Carol kept the manuscript until she sold it to a San Francisco bookseller (who sold it to Virginia). For all ebook purchases, you will be prompted to create an account or login with your existing HarperCollins username and password.