October 2006

Talking about Words: Rehabbing Words

By Richard Bailey

Many women students at Michigan today see nothing wrong with being called girls, and they said if they heard me speak of a “really smart girl in the class” they’d think that was just fine.

Back in 1972, Helen Reddy had a number-one hit song with the opening line:  “I am woman, hear me roar.” Mothers of these twenty-first century girl students sang that song lustily and took umbrage if a male teacher said there was a “really smart girl” in his class. Of course in those days it was quite OK to call female children under ten (or so) girls, and who could stop the mothers and grandmothers from getting the girls together for a card game or even a hen party? But women who were college students were definitely not girls.

It was a time when a local college offered a powder-puff mechanics class to an audience of girl car-fixers. That course title came and went faster than the eye could see.

Roundabout here, girl for “woman” was no longer heard from males who knew what was good for them. Now, suddenly, it's back from the purgatory of unworthy words.

Sensitivity about words comes and goes. In medieval times, wench was a quite inoffensive term, and one might politely inquire if a newborn was a wench or a knave. Pretty quickly knave began to be applied to scallywags (male). In about the same (short) time wench drifted into the semantic orbit of strumpet (female).

Not much has happened to elevate the status of knave, but wench is on its way back, at least in semi-ironic use.

An outgrowth of “Renaissance Festivals” is the International Wenches Guild, and those who join receive a pewter pin and a membership card. They've even come up with a phrase based on the idea that wench is an acronym:  “Women Entitled to Nothing but Complete Happiness.”

Now comes slut, the latest candidate for rehabbing in this semantic field. Last summer, the columnist Maureen Dowd wrote about what seemed to be happening to this abusive term for women. For young women, she found by asking, there was nothing so terrible about slut, and getting in touch with your inner slut was a way to build character and increase serenity.

Slut never had a respectable meaning—until now! There’s a self-help book:  The Ethical Slut (1997), and, according to Google, there are nearly 11 million blogs and websites with slut in them right now, not all of them demeaning.

Slut may be on the way up, but my students told me that it would not be good to say, “There’s a really smart slut in my class.” So I won’t.

Richard W. Bailey is Fred Newton Scott Collegiate Professor of English at the University of Michigan. His latest publication (co-edited with Colette Moore and Marilyn Miller) is an edition of a chronicle of daily life in London written by a merchant in the middle of the sixteenth century. This electronic book incorporates images of the manuscript, a transcript of the writing it contains, and a modernization of the text for easy reading. Thanks to the University of Michigan Library and the University Press, the work is freely available to all: http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/machyn/