A short essay on portmanteaus, -bros & -NOs
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“You’re not Jesus, bro.” Love Island wisdom.
The first “regendered” word I ever noticed was herstory, which consciously brought attention to the fact that women’s stories had often been forgotten or marginalised. It was coined around 1970.* Political activists of the time also came up with femistry and galgebra, which seem catchy in retrospect but weren’t taken up in quite the same way. Around that time, Ms was finally gaining traction (which has a fascinating story of “antedating”). The likes of Latinx and Chicanx were a long way off, as were the pronoun wars. But the message was clear. No longer would men have free rein in viewing and defining everything through their testosterone-tinted spectacles.
Language is power. As Meg Wolitzer says, “The idea of male experience being representative of general experience, and female experience being women’s experience only, is depressing.”
Such changes in language are not just symbolic. Caroline Criado Perez, the author of the brilliant book Invisible Women: Exposing data bias in a world designed by men, has noted, when in the past we read something that assumed “man” can stand in for human and “he” for he or she, most of us – including women – pictured ... a man. Assuming male bodies (and minds) as the default has let to crash-test dummies being designed around the size of an adult male, making cars and seat belts far less safe for smaller females, and office temperatures being set too low for the average female physiology.
Sometimes language leads, though it often follows. You can’t just declare that certain words be expunged from the dictionary and others be used in their place; well, you can try, but that way lies a Godwinian slippery slope. There is no language umpire, at least not of English (and those of other languages often seem like the parent at the swimming pool telling their child not to go off the high diving board). Nevertheless, social change can lead to language change and vice versa – even if in many areas we’re only at the foothills. For example, actresses have generally become actors, though this is not accepted by all women in the profession. The harder task of equal pay and billing for equal box-office continues. Other female-only terms have faded into the past: for instance, the far rarer aviatrices became pilots. (The more useful distinction of dominatrix means it remains.) Waiters for both sexes apparently won't do. Wait-staff seems an ugly kludge. Man-hours seems inconsiderate, yet person-hours is clumsy. Work-hours?
Then marketers got hold of regendering. It’s worth noting that men received much of the attention. Metrosexuals began to manscape their body hair, wear mandals, retreat to their man-caves, and go on mandates. Male people began reading lad-lit, talked of the menaissance and worried about the manopause. It wasn’t all fun and games. Men were accused (often convincingly) of mansplaining to female experts and manspreading on buses and trains. In half-admiring, half-mocking tones, close male friendships became bromances. The bro exploded. Everywhere bros were calling others bro – or brah or breh or bruh. The portmanteaus (or portmanbros) kept coming – *consults notes* brohemian, brotastic, brovaries, alibrony, brotogenic, quid pro bro, bros drinking brosé, writing broems, wearing brogawear, making social bro pas. Yuk yuk. Once America’s NPR identified four types of bros – dudely, jocking, preppy and stoner-ish – we all realised the bro-mare had to end.
Some neologisms turn out to be positive and celebratory, more than a few are what Oxford Dictionaries politely calls “stunt coinages”. (You may enjoy the hashtags #portmantNO and #portmanNO) These have little hope of being picked up more widely (guybrator? ladytestants?), though others made a useful political point.
When Brett Kavanagh finally got the nod from the US Senate – did anyone ever think there’d be a Supreme Court justice called Brett? – critics accused him of attracting himpathy. This, one definition went, was “the inappropriate and disproportionate sympathy powerful men often enjoy in cases of sexual assault, intimate partner violence, homicide and other misogynistic behaviour”. Of course, Kavanagh denied all sexual assault claims, and didn’t kill anyone that we know of. But was he among those powerful men who get inappropriate and disproportionate sympathy? Paging Jeffrey Epstein.
Logicsplainers, by the way, may claim that herstory is bunkum because the word history is etymologically unrelated to the possessive pronoun his. Sure, though the Greek historia, meaning “finding out”, comes from histor, meaning “learned, wise man”. As women might respond: QED, dude.
*Is there any truth to the idea that feminists burned their bras in the 1970s? Not really. Allied: Did someone really burn their Nike-encased feet in protest at Colin Kaepernick? Probably not.
GOOD READS ON LANGUAGE
The Philistines were not such philistines, notes Sam Leith. Though, thank goodness, words often become untethered from their original meanings. I give you Oxford Dictionary’s etymology of bugger: “Middle English (originally denoting a heretic, specifically an Albigensian): from Middle Dutch, from Old French bougre ‘heretic’, from medieval Latin Bulgarus ‘Bulgarian’, particularly one belonging to the Orthodox Church and therefore regarded as a heretic by the Roman Church. The sense ‘sodomite’ (16th century) arose from an association of heresy with forbidden sexual practices; its use as a general insult dates from the early 18th century.”
Why the Japanese interrupt each other so much.
We’ve heard of white, green and pink-washing. It’s such as useful portmanteau form that we now have straight-washing, woke-washing and sport-washing, which is using sport direct attention from, say, human-rights abuses of a country.
Why so many people are capitalising initial letters to make a point. I now understand that the “use of aLteRnAtInG cApS (often associated with SpongeBob meme” is intended to convey mockery.
OTHER READS
Are we at peak newsletter? Er, hope not.
The bystander effect may be a myth.
“While it has always been a majority of old, white males who draw up society’s moral codes, they are now being back-footed by the young – those they deride as ‘snowflakes’. This is interesting and exciting and after all, the young have always changed language and opinions. It would certainly be a pity if this generation took us back to banning books like Lolita, but I’m not convinced this will happen. My own experiences with Putney leave me feeling there are plenty of young people ready to embrace controversial books, with no trigger warnings or censorship.”
“You have to undermine moral boundaries, inure people to the acceptance of acts of extreme cruelty. Like hounds, people have to be blooded. They have to be given the taste for savagery. Fascism does this by building up the sense of threat from a despised out-group.” Fintan O’Toole on pre-fascism.
You know you don't own those books, right?
I’ll finish where I epigraphed. I’ve given up on Love Island. I’d like to say it was because of the damning findings of this excellent piece: “But even beyond the structure of the show, Love Island goes to great lengths to destabilise contestants on a daily basis. Every clock in the villa is wrong, meaning Islanders have no clue what time it is. Swimwear is mandatory — no covering up allowed. And contestants are chastised over a PA system if they speak too much about things that are unrelated to the show.” But it’s at least as much that it just got boring and there’s no couple left to barrack for.
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