语言恶女：女性如何夺回语言
最新书摘：
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张生面孔2024-07-17他们似乎没有意识到，他们的批评根本没有任何客观的、符合逻辑的道理，他们的出发点仅仅是女人说话听起来不像中年白人男性。他们实际上在迫使女性处于一种自我质疑的状态，好让她们闭嘴。
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Le Flaneur2022-05-29In 2017 comedian Peter White put the lunacy of the compliment argument into perspective with this pithy statement: “I think the golden rule for men should be: If you’re a man, don’t say anything to a woman on the street that you wouldn’t want a man saying to you in prison.”
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Le Flaneur2022-05-28How much of an effect can these grammatical gender assignments truly have on the way people see the real world? A major one, and there’s research to back this up. In 1962, scholars conducted an experiment where Italian speakers were presented with a series of made-up gibberish nouns that either ended in o or a (typically masculine and feminine suffixes in Italian, respectively). The speakers were asked to imagine what these faux nouns might represent and describe them using a list of adjectives: good, bad, strong, weak, small, large, etc. Then, they were asked to describe men and women using the same adjectives. The results? The feminine nouns, just like the women themselves, were described as good, weak, and small. The masculine nouns and men were bad, strong, and large. This study proves...
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Le Flaneur2022-05-28There is at least one type of person you are guaranteed never to find correcting a person’s grammar, however: a linguist. That sounds counterintuitive, but language scientists aren’t interested in how language should work; they’re interested in how it does work.
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Le Flaneur2022-05-22For decades, linguists have agreed that young, urban females tend to be our linguistic innovators. As South Korea is to beauty products and Silicon Valley is to apps, women in their teens, twenties, and thirties create—and/or incubate—future language trends. (Though not on purpose or for money.) “It’s generally pretty well known that if you identify a sound change in progress, then young people will be leading old people, and women tend to be maybe half a generation ahead of males,” Liberman says. (Fun fact: linguists have also determined that the least innovative language users are nonmobile, older, rural males, which they’ve majestically given the acronym “NORMs.”)Exactly why women seem to move language forward like this is not as clear. One hypothesis is that women are simply given mo...
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Le Flaneur2022-05-21Another tactic women use to establish conversational connections is a certain form of question-asking that is also misinterpreted as a sign of insecurity. By Lakoff’s—and most average English speakers’—measure, when women ask “too many” questions (and these include questions with declarative functions like, “Should we leave for dinner now?” as well as tag questions like “It’s a nice day, isn’t it?”), it always comes from a place of timidity. But Jennifer Coates’s research has shown that in women-only spaces, questions (both the declarative and tag kinds) serve the handy, cooperative purposes of introducing new topics, checking the viewpoints of other speakers, and initiating stories.
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Le Flaneur2022-05-21We’re also living in a time when we find respected media outlets and public figures circulating criticisms of women’s voices—like that they speak with too much vocal fry, overuse the words like and literally, and apologize in excess. They brand judgments like these as pseudofeminist advice aimed at helping women talk with “more authority” so that they can be “taken more seriously.” What they don’t seem to realize is that they’re actually keeping women in a state of self-questioning—keeping them quiet—for no objectively logical reason other than that they don’t sound like middle-aged white men.
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柯里昂妮2024-12-30看看我们的文化，看看我们对女性的羞辱，脏话大多带有性暗示其实一点都不奇怪。“女人即性对象”是父权制最古老的修辞手法之一，这很大程度上是出于数千年来的一种看法，即女性的个人欲望和性自由意志在本质上是坏的。即使只是简单地浏览一下我们语言中针对女性的俚语，也会发现女性的性欲是可耻的，无论一个女人如何处理她的欲望。我们的文化只给女人的欲望两种归宿：若性生活丰富，就让她获得妓女的骂名；若她选择禁欲，就给她贴上假正经的标签。
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冬天烂透老霸王2024-07-20在我看来，最令人信服的理论是，年轻女性能推进语言的创新是因为她们把语言视为一种维护自己权利的工具，而在现有的文化环境中，除此以外她们并没有很多其他选择。对于那些希望提升社会地位的女性来说，语言是一种赋权的资源，世世代代都是如此。
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我是一颗椰2024-06-23一万年前，当智人过着游牧生活，在不同的地方辗转流浪时，男人和女人都有多个性伴侣，女性性行为被认为是完全正常和美好的。但当人类停止了迁徙，独立而性生活自由的女人才开始为男人所不齿，因为一旦拥有土地变得令人向往，人们就希望能够把土地传给自己的孩子，而男人为了明确知道谁才是自己的亲生孩子，就必须让女人只忠诚于一个性伴侣。于是为了建立一种传承体系，社会变成了父权社会，任何女神式的性自由观念也就不复存在。伴随着女性性自由的终结，人们普遍开始对女性的性行为感到厌恶、把像“cun”这样的词水远钉在了耻辱柱上一可能直到父权制消亡情况才会有所改变。
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Le Flaneur2022-05-31So here’s my favorite strategy: people who don’t feel as though our current curse words consider or empower their bodies can invent a brand-new set of terms that do. The word clit, for one, has all the makings of a lovable curse word—it’s monosyllabic and plosive, just like dick and fuck. By shouting “suck my clit,” instead of “suck my dick,” women (or anyone with a clit) can flip around the POV in a phonetically satisfying manner. As Fricke points out, “‘Clit’ sounds like the kind of body part that would take action and, combined with colorful phrasing and the right tone of voice, could come off as pretty damn degrading.”* Or fun, punchy, and full of humor if that’s the intent. Maybe from now on we should all say “holy clit.”
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Le Flaneur2022-05-29In the United States, a lot of this drama has to do with pronouns. As transgender and nonbinary identities become more and more visible, so does the discussion of “preferred pronouns,”* and many people who identify as neither male nor female are choosing to go by singular they. But not everyone is on board yet. Folks often defend their resistance to using they to describe one person by arguing that the word as they learned it is plural; using it any other way, they contest, would be grammatically incorrect.There are two huge flaws in their logic: The first is that using a plural pronoun for a singular meaning is nothing new for English speakers. A few hundred years ago, the second-person you was exclusively a plural; thou was the singular version (e.g., “Thou shalt not kill,” “Thou shalt...
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Le Flaneur2022-05-21Lakoff’s inventory of lady language included: a tendency to over-apologize, “empty” adjectives (“This chocolate mousse is heavenly”), ultrapolite language (“Would you mind if . . .”), strong emphasis (“I LOVE that show”), indirect requests (“I think the package is still downstairs,” instead of, “Can you go get the package?”), hypercorrection of grammar (“between you and I,” as opposed to “between you and me”), hedging (“kind of,” “you know”), tag questions (“That movie was good, wasn’t it?”), and an avoidance of cursing (“Goodness gracious” instead of “Holy shit”).Lakoff’s argument was that women systematically use these linguistic features more than men because they have been socialized to do so as a part of the cultural expectation that women present themselves as deferential and unass...
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Orbiu2024-08-05（1）“伊”作为不分性别的第三人称代词历史悠久。尽管上古汉语中并没有真正的第三人称代词，但是“伊”与“彼”“其”“之”“他”都能充当第三人称代词。另外，“伊”从魏晋时期开始作为第三人称代词使用，例如“勿学汝兄，汝兄自不如伊”（《世说新语·品藻》），“羊邓是世婚，江家我顾伊，庾家伊顾我”（《世说新语·方正》），“吾见张时，伊已六十”（《南史》），“薛蟠因伊倔强，将酒照脸泼去”（《红楼梦》）。（2）“伊”在现代吴语、闽南语、闽东语、莆仙语中仍然大量使用。现代白话文初兴时，“伊”曾被作为第三人称女性代词使用，但今已罕见。（3）与汉语中其他无性别第三人称代词（如渠、佢、彼、斯人、此人、怹）相比，译者私心觉得“伊”更好听。
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Le Flaneur2022-05-22So why is it that young women get the harshest dose of criticism for vocal fry, uptalk, like, and other hedges? According to linguists, the way that these speech qualities are perceived has way less to do with the thing being said and way more to do with who’s saying it. In other words, judgments about linguistic prestige depend a whole lot on how we feel about the speaker. A study from 2010 conducted by two linguists from Stanford University and UC Santa Cruz found that participants who listened to someone positioned as a political “expert” did not interpret the person’s uptalk as a sign of insecurity. But when the uptalker was introduced as a “nonexpert,” listeners questioned their competence. UPenn linguist Mark Liberman says that even one of our American presidents was known to uptalk....
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Orbiu2024-08-03倾向于过度道歉；形容词“含义空洞不明”，比如“This chocolate mousse is heavenly”（这巧克力慕斯棒极了）；过分礼貌，比如“不知道你是否介意我……”；过分强调，比如“那个演出我爱死了！”；表达请求不直接，比如会说“我感觉包裹还在楼下哎”，而不是直接说“你能去拿一下包裹吗？”；语法过度矫正（hypercorrection），比如说“between you and I”，而不是“between you and me”（你我之间）；使用模糊限制语，比如“kind of”（有点）、“you know”；使用句尾附加问句，比如“那部电影很好看，不是吗？”；回避脏话，比如会说“Goodness gracious”（我的天哪），而不是“Holy shit”（我靠）。
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Le Flaneur2022-05-28One 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). The way any of these folks talk isn’t inherently more or less worthy of respect. It only sounds that way because it reflects an underlying assumption about who holds more power in our culture.As Deborah Cameron once said, “Teaching young women to accommodate to the linguistic preferences, aka prejudices, of the men who run law firms and engineering companies is doing the patriarchy’s work for it.” It accepts the idea that “feminine” speech is the problem, rather than the sexist attitudes toward it. “The business of feminism is surely to challenge sexist attitudes,” Came...
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Le Flaneur2022-05-22People have looked down upon the way women use language for centuries, and like Otto Jespersen and Bob Garfield, they often write off women’s communication styles as stupid and annoying. But observers of gender and foreign language have noticed that when there truly is a significant difference between how men and women talk, it’s often because women were literally forbidden from using certain words, sounds, or writing systems and were thus forced to innovate. For instance, in some of southern Africa’s Bantu languages, there is a strict rule that forbids married women from saying the name of their father-in-law, or any word that sounds similar or has the same root. Bantu women often work their way around this rule by borrowing synonyms from other local languages. Some linguists think that i...
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Le Flaneur2022-05-22Language can be an empowering resource for women who wish to move up in the world; it has been for generations. A striking example: In 1978 award-winning linguist Susan Gal traveled to Austria to study a small, poor Hungarian-speaking village that had ended up on Austrian soil due to how the borders changed after World War I. This border shift was bad luck for these Hungarian villagers, because now they were forced to live in a country where everyone else spoke German. So, the women—the young women at least—began learning it. This was a smart move because having some German under their belts would allow them to leave the village, get better jobs, marry hot Austrian husbands if they were into that sort of thing, and generally climb the socioeconomic stepladder. Gal noticed that it was too l...
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Orbiu2024-06-15一个小男孩和他的父亲遭遇车祸，父亲在车祸中丧生，小男孩被迅速送到医院并准备紧急手术。外科医生走进手术室，一看就说：“我不能给他做手术——那是我儿子。”这是怎么回事？这种情况让很多人疑惑不解，觉得男孩的父亲不是已经死了吗，怎么还能去给他儿子做手术？只有少数几个人得出结论，说那位外科医生实际上是小男孩的母亲。啊，多么罕见的、奇异的“女”外科医生。