The Father Tongue

By Paul Gray

WORDS AND WOMEN by CASEY MILLER and KATE SWIFT 197 pages. Anchor Press/Doubleday. $7.95.

Anyone who wants to feel oppressed by the English language will never be disappointed. With a vocabulary of some 750,000 words--the world's largest and richest--the language of Shakespeare and Spiro Agnew provides enough terms to offend almost everybody. Those most recently and publicly irked are the feminists. The mother tongue, as they have argued for some time, is a lexicon of male chauvinism. For years the language has evolved along the lines preferred by the male-controlled society that used it.

Words and Women does not add much information to this familiar controversy. But it is the best brief summary of the whole question. Journalists Miller and Swift write as if their aim were to provoke thought, not outrage. Any language that insinuates a second-class status for women ought to be modified, they argue, if only for the sake of precision.

Take, for instance, the hoary old matter of "man." The word has for so long meant the whole human race that "males are seen as representing the species in a way females are not." In view of this confusion, they ask, why not rely more often on terms like "human beings" or "people" when the aim is to include everyone? (If you kill a woman, the authors ask, should you really be charged with manslaughter? On the other hand, though Miller and Swift do not ask that the Classics be rewritten, might not Hamlet some day be forced to say "What a piece of work is people!") They predictably bridle at "he" or "his" used as pronouns when the sex of the antecedent is unspecified (everyone will get his comeuppance). The plural pronouns "they" and "their," they suggest, could become singular, unisex pronouns. Purists will howl, but the usage (everyone will get their comeuppance) is already lamentably widespread.

English is riddled with anti-female locutions so common that their intent has been obscured. Men insult each other by casting aspersions on their mothers or by turning "feminine" characteristics into epithets like "sissy" and worse.Once-honorable words like queen, madam and mistress have, in fact, been tarred with salacious connotations that their male counterparts--king, sir and master--have escaped. Sometimes Miller and Swift's complaints are plain silly. The authors sniff linguistic oppression in the fact that women are said to "marry into" families; the same thing, of course, is said of men when they hitch up to richer or more prominent clans. Prince Phillip "married into" the British royal family. Sargent Shriver did the same to the House of Kennedy.

The problem restated by this book is more than a joke and less than a na tional crisis. To their credit, the authors usually hover somewhere between these extremes. They admit that social attitudes cannot be changed overnight simply by inventing words. But even such terms as "Ms" and "chairperson" they insist, really do help meet needs created by the growing independence and authority of women. Many people (not all of them men) would rather scrape their fingernails across a blackboard than hear such ugly and artificial neologisms especially when they are propounded on the unproved assumption that it will do some public good. But most new words seem awkward at first. Over the centuries the ones that survive do so only because they are useful--and the useful ones sound better as the years go by.

Paul Gray

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.