Equality seems taken into consideration in almost every aspect of our modern lives and it’s been this way for quite some time. Another of the most fundamental and fascinating aspects of life is our language. So what about a topical mixture of the two? Britain has never been the most progressive nation (or group of nations for the sake of pedanticism) and this bleeds through into our language. A rather shameful example of this is in good old death-sticks. Notice the difference between the words ‘Cigar’ and ‘Cigarette’? A ‘Cigarette’ has the diminutive suffix ‘-ette’ which is derived from French and is used to feminise a word; to make it lesser. A Cigar is far larger and carries with it different associations of prestige and class, whereas cigarettes are much smaller and carry associations that may be considered, well…. A tad scummy. So to be a woman is to be less? This type of gender inequality is, unfortunately, not limited to ciggies nor just to our spelling.
Language isn’t just about spelling, punctuation and grammar. It’s about the meanings we, as a society, create for words and if we look at some of these meanings and associations it would be moronic to say that we have equality in language.
I recently visited my GP and was told to wait till I was called over by a nurse. Five minutes later, much to my surprise, I was greeted by a burly, full bearded gentleman in full nurse uniform. I felt slightly embarrassed that I had assumed that my nurse would have been a friendly, young woman with light makeup and a soft voice and not the man who looks like he throat-slammed Bigfoot out of existence. A comforting reminder that we are socialised into an inherently sexist society from a young age and one of the ways this is so effectively done is by building and teaching a language chock full of gender bias’ and it is going to take a lot of time, effort and, the majority of humanity’s downfall, intelligence to rectify these inequalities. My seemingly sexist slip up is an example of marked and unmarked terms where a word brings with it an assumption of gender. An actor is an unmarked term and the more generally used whereas Actress is the marked term. In my case this assumption was that the nurse would be a woman when I was told to expect a “nurse” rather than told, specifically, ‘male nurse’.
That said, attitudes surrounding these blatant hallmarks of the patriarchy have rapidly evolved to challenge and oppose the inequalities that we encounter every day in our language that would have otherwise, previously, been overlooked. In short, the English language is, in no way, at a point of inequality and has some hefty powerlifting to do. However, in terms of a general societal attitude, we are much closer to gaining equality in language than we ever have before. Of course, we still have a few straggling Baby Boomers, dragging their feet and throwing a strop at the idea of progressive change. Thankfully though, they should be dead within the next 20 to 30 years… although by that point I wouldn’t be surprised if we all were. Planet’s fucked.
