Fritinancy

On the Visual Thesaurus: The language of suffrage

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, which gave women the right to vote. My February column for the Visual Thesaurus looks at the linguistic legacy of the long, persistent effort that led to the amendment.

Full access to the column is paywalled for three months. A subscription is still just $19.95 a year; if you’re hesitating, here’s an excerpt:

Pronouns played a surprising role in the right-to-vote fight. For centuries, grammar guides had insisted that the masculine pronouns he, him, and his were “inclusive” or “generic” — that is, they referred to women as well as to men. This assumption “has even been enshrined in British and American law,” writes Dennis Baron in his new book, What’s Your Pronoun?, adding that “both the UK Act of Interpretation (1850) and the US Dictionary Act (1871) declared that, in the law, words referring to men also include women.” But only when it was convenient to do so and when “the context shows that such words were intended to be used in a more limited sense,” as the Dictionary Act put it. Suffragists seized on this contradiction to argue for their rights. “If you insist on this version of the letter of the law, we shall insist that you be consistent,” the pioneering suffragist Susan B. Anthony argued in 1873: Government should “exempt women from taxation for the support of the government, and from penalties for the violation of laws.” In the end, Baron writes, women in both the UK and the US “won the vote without any explicit legal concession that he includes she.” The 19th Amendment includes no pronouns at all — only the neutral word “citizens.”

Read the rest of the column.

Related: Suffragist or suffragette?

Word of the week: Suffragist

2020 is the centennial of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibits the states and the federal government from denying women the right to vote. The amendment was finally ratified by the required 36 states—Tennessee was the final one, after a hard-fought campaign—in August 1920, 42 years after it was first introduced in Congress.

19th Amendment centennial pin via Etsy. Purple, white, and yellow were the colors of the 20th-century suffrage movement; they symbolized loyalty, purity, and hope.

 

Small groups of American women had been organizing and fighting for the right to vote since the 1830s. (Before the American Revolution, women in some colonies could vote.) In 1870, after African American men won the vote through the 15th Amendment, the word suffragist—which earlier in the century had been a generic term for any advocate for voting rights—began to be associated specifically with those who advocated for woman suffrage by peaceful, lawful means. The OED’s earliest citation for this usage, in a May 13, 1870, edition of the Boston Post, is typical of the mocking tone that would persist for decades in discussions of women’s rights: “A lady suffragist out West brands as slanderous the charge that strong-minded women have big feet.”

“Looking Backward,” an anti-suffrage illustration by Laura E. Foster. The steps lead away from love, marriage, and children and toward suffrage, strife, anxiety, and loneliness. Published in Life magazine, August 22, 1912. From the collections of the Library of Congress.

 

September linkfest

“Texting is not destroying the language” and five other things you may not understand about English. (John McIntyre for the Baltimore Sun)

*

A study of 597 logos found that “descriptive logos more favorably impact consumers’ brand perceptions than nondescriptive ones, and are more likely to improve brand performance.” (Harvard Business Review)

Old descriptive logos (left) vs. new nondescriptive logos (right).

Girls, girls, girls!

A few years ago I noted the proliferation of girl-y book titles: Gone Girl, How to Build a Girl, Not That Kind of Girl, et al. (not to mention The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and her multiple avatars). The trend flattened out for a while, but lately it’s burst back, more robust than ever, in plural form. Where the earlier literary crop tended to favor self-reflective memoirs or novels with complicated protagonists, the new girls in town are historical and come in groups or crews; in one way or another, they made history en masse.

From just the last year and a half we have: 

Word of the week: Reckoning

All this autumn, the stories have been tumbling out: about sexual harassment, sexual “misconduct” and, in some cases, actual rape, perpetrated by men in positions of power. Men in Hollywood (Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K., Kevin Spacey), men in the media (Mark Halperin, Leon Wieseltier, Michael Oreskes), men in tech (Uber, SoFi, Tesla), men in politics (Roy Moore, Donald Trump). The stories have been told by famous women, by almost-famous women, and by non-famous women who took to Facebook and Twitter, sometimes revealing no more than the #MeToo hashtag.

There has been shock, anger, and even backlash. Overwhelmingly, though, there has been a demand for reckoning.

 

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, a role-playing video game released in 2012.

Word of the week: Nasty

Nasty: Filthy; offensive; unpleasant; morally corrupt. Documented since the late 14th century (in the “filthy” sense), but the etymology is murky. There are similar words in related languages – nestig (“foul”) in Dutch; naskot (“dirty”) in Swedish – but the OED says “the relationship between the forms is unclear.”

Nasty was all over the news last week after Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump interrupted his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, during their third debate on October 19, leaning into the microphone and saying she was “such a nasty woman.”

 

At about :19.

November Linkfest

With 8 percent of 2015 still in the mysterious future, the first Word of the Year (WOTY) nominations have already begun. Oxford Dictionaries made history, and stirred up some controversy, by selecting an emoji – “Face with Tears of Joy” – as its, um, lexical unit of the year. (Emoji was a Fritinancy Word of the Week in January 2012.)

 

And at the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Lingua Franca blog, Allan Metcalf – he’s the executive secretary of the American Dialect Society – makes the case for basic: “the word this year to describe someone or something that fits a stereotype, especially the ‘basic white girl’.”

"Plus Is Equal"

Fritinancy Fashion Week continues with the story of a venerable retailer, a mysterious ad, and a clever tagline/hashtag.

The September 2015 issue of American Vogue contains 832 pages, and on only two of those pages do we see women who aren’t whippet-thin. The women on those two pages are photographed in silhouette against a gray background, and although the spread appears to be an ad, no brand is identified – there’s only a date (9.14.15), an enigmatic hashtag (#PlusIsEqual) and web URL (plusisequal.com), and “It’s time for change. Be part of it.” 

It’s about time. (And what a perfect day for this.) #WomensEqualityDay#PlusIsEqualpic.twitter.com/EpLIYTc1VS

— Lane Bryant (@lanebryant) August 26, 2015

 

Word of the Week: Waist Trainer

Waist trainer: A compression garment that squeezes the wearer’s midsection to create an hourglass shape.

“Celebrity double wide waist trainer corset” via Groupon; 87 percent latex, 10 percent polyamide, 3 percent elastene. That “double wide” in the name is perhaps unfortunate.

Name in the News: Addyi

Earlier this week, Sprout Pharmaceuticals announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had granted approval of Addyi (pronounced “ADD-ee,” as though the “i” weren’t there), a once-daily, non-hormonal pill for the treatment of low sexual desire in premenopausal women. The prescription drug, whose generic name is flibanserin (fly-BAN-ser-in), will go on sale October 17, 2015.

Other reporters have commented on the medical and business aspects of the announcement. Even The Onion, America’s finest news source, has weighed in. I’m here to talk about the Addyi name—its spelling, its pronunciation, and its brand qualities.