How not to love language
LP is trying to sound intelligent again. This never goes well.
I wonder what she thinks she means by “a word like woman.” Like woman how? What other words are like the word woman? Man, girl, boy, I suppose. Will those do? Is that what she’s saying? The four words that name people of the female and male sex?
If so why do those words, in particular, need to be subject to change of meaning more than others?
I would think it’s the opposite – we need those words to be particularly stable and clear in their meaning.
The fakery about thinking it’s languagephobic and anti-freedom of expression to continue knowing what “woman” means is laughable. Laurie Penny doesn’t love language, she loves her image of herself as hip and enlightened.
I can think of some examples in common usage where the word “woman” isn’t applied to adult human females.
“Joe, stop being such a woman and just do your job.”
“Ooh, look who’s ordering quiche. Looks like Don’s a woman. Haha.”
“That there pair of round hills out on the horizon — well, we call that The Woman. Reckon you can guess why.”
If some university or other offered a doctorate in pedantry I’d sign up right now, just to piss you off. :D
So can I, Sastra, and the reason those all work is precisely because the people using the word that way all agree that the one thing it can’t mean is its opposite – ‘man’.
I wonder what other words Ms Penny and her cohort would like to mean the opposite? I’d love to overhear the conversation between her and her bank manager when she tries to convince him that it is mere pedantry on his part to insist that a one hundred pound overdraft does not mean that she has a hundred pounds in her account.
Trans money is money!
So beneath language, though not completely detached from it, there is the Law of Identity, which can be expressed in Logic, as a Singular Term, through language, and is also an axiom. It goes like this — For all A: A = A.
Pedantic enough? :D
“Pedantry is always regressive” is a hilariously pedantic statement
It’s always risky to make any claims about linguistic universals, because just when you do some missionary or anthropologist will stumble on some previously undocumented (or poorly documented) language somewhere that belies your claim. But I’d venture to guess that every human language has words that distinguish between male and female humans.
Of course, words themselves change meaning over time. One Old English word for woman, cwene, came to mean in Middle English “female serf” and then “prostitute” and to be spelled “quean”; it’s pretty much dropped out of use, probably because it’s a homophone with “queen”, which has a different (though related) etymology.
Another word for “woman” was wif, which in modern English becomes “wife”. The word “woman” itself derives from wifman, “woman-human”. (“Man” at the time didn’t refer exclusively to the male sex; that came later.)
And then there’s lady….
So anyway, if at some point in the future the word “woman” loses its meaning of “adult human female” and comes to mean something like “person who wears dresses and high heels and tilts head”, there’s a pretty decent chance that some other word will replace it.
And as far as “freedom of expression” goes, there’s no law against saying stupid shit. Be creative! :P
Unless I’m mistaken, I don’t think LP would accept “it depends on which definition of ‘woman’ you’re using” as a response to “are trans women women?”
In fact, wasn’t that more or less how our host responded to that question from FtB bloggers? Not that LP was a part of that specifically as far as I recall.
Yes, it was. I made a distinction between ontological and political definitions; the result was a torrent of sneers for using such an arcane word as “ontological.” Ffs, I thought. If we can’t even agree on a distinction as basic as that there is zero point in my staying around here.
OK, enough pussyfooting around, Ophelia. It’s time you come clean. A simple question for you. Answer yes or no: Does ontology precede mixology? And note that any answer aside from an unequivocal “no” will reveal you as an mixolophobe.
That definition of woman would exclude 100% of the females I know.
What definition indeed. A simple dictionary definition of the word itself will do, but what they want is to redefine the definition to include their twisted semantics. What the word describes is included in the definition, an adult human female, in other words A = A. If *some* B’s are A’s, then A ≠ A. It becomes A+B = A, which is to say A is no longer A, leaving us with only the original (according to the axiomatic Law of Identity) A = A. Now if *some* B’s are A’s means that they are C’s, then we can go with A+B = C, or A+B = A+B, and then back to the axiom C = C iff all A+B’s are C’s. However A’s are not A+B’s, B’s or C’s, they are A’s. In other words, transwomen are transwomen. Now if we could get them to honestly describe what distinguishes a transwoman from a woman, this would all become uncontroversial as, logically speaking, it should be.
@iknklast,
Yeah, that was pretty much my intention there.
What an eye roll. Let’s see, trains become planes, planes become boats, boats become Ferris wheels, vegan means contains beef, prescription only means you can buy it at the candy store. Words have an agreed meaning for a reason. Meanings are sanctioned by the State for a reason. pedantry, while sometimes frustrating, is often critical. [consider implications of above]
In my experience, lovers of language are very reluctant to demand a word be changed in meaning to suit their whim.
Pedantry is one of those irregular nouns:
When I do it, it is precision.
When you do it, it is nitpicking.
When they do it, it is pedantry.
And when I do it, it is sarcasm. :P
When xe/xi/ze/uwu/^_^;;/demon does it, it’s stunning and brave.
Fun fact, the genders in Old English of the three synonymous words mentioned:
wifmann: masculine
wif: neuter
cwene: feminine