GENDER ROLE WORDS

Certain sex-linked words depend (for their meanings) on cultural stereotypes: feminine/masculine, manly/womanly, boyish/girlish, husbandly/ wifely, fatherly/motherly, unfeminine/unmasculine, unmanly/unwo-manly, etc. What a person understands by these words will vary from culture to culture and even within a culture. Because the words depend (for their meanings) on interpretations of stereotypical behavior or characteristics, they may be grossly inaccurate when applied to individuals. Somewhere, sometime, men and women have said, thought, or done everything the other sex has said, thought, or done except for a very few sex-linked biological activities (e.g., only women can give birth or nurse a baby). To describe a woman as unwomanly is a contradiction in terms; if a woman is doing it, saying it, wearing it, thinking it, it must be – by definition – womanly.

F. Scott Fitzgerald did not use “feminine” to describe the unforgettable Daisy in The Great Gatsby. He wrote instead, “She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had.” Daisy’s charm did not belong to Woman; it was uniquely hers. Replacing vague sex-linked descriptors with thoughtful words that describe an individual instead of a member of a set can lead to language that touches people’s minds and hearts.

CATEGORIES OF THE NOUN

<== попередня сторінка	\|	наступна сторінка ==>
SEX AND GENDER	\|	THE NUMBER

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