Feminization of Opprobrious Terms
This formulation refers to the sociolinguistic process whereby opprobrious terms, swearwords, and insults originally referring to creatures, males or both genders have shifted semantically to be applied to women. The terms are very numerous, the shift has taken place over centuries, and there are virtually none that have undergone the reverse process. This suggests a definite sexist dynamic at work. Although men have traditionally been the dominant sex, all speech communities are made up of both men and women, so that these shifts in meaning are in some sense the responsibility of both genders.
The process of feminization is evidenced in the following terms: bawd, coquette, doll, dragon, hag, harlot, harpy, harridan, minx, scold, shrew, siren, sow, tartar, termagant, witch , and wench . Of these, scold, shrew, and witch have their own entries. These bring out such interesting points that male witches are actually recorded earlier (from about 890) than the female variety and that shrew and scold were applied to males before being used to stereotype the loud, aggressive, or “difficult” woman. Most of the other terms fall under the entries for prostitutes and women, stereotypes of.
The semantic histories of wench, coquette, doll, minx , and gypsy contain many surprises. Wench has its origins in Old English wencel , a child of either sex, but by the time that William Langland used it (ca. 1377), it was female-specific. He uniquely described the Virgin Mary as “Goddes Wenche” (C Text, Passus xix, l. 134), but also referred to the polar opposite, “a wench of the stews,” that is, a woman of the brothel (B Text, Passus xix, l. 433). Thereafter it degenerated to mean a mistress, a wanton woman, or one perceived to be sexually available. Although often preceded by common or wanton , it could be a term of affection, albeit condescending, as at the end of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (V ii 181).
Coquette is a remarkably simple case of sex change: the original form was male coquet , a young cock, notable for what the OED rightly calls “its strutting gait and amorous characteristics.” The first appearance of the female form coquette is in 1669, but the word could be used of both a male flirt and of “a wanton girl that speaks fair to several lovers at once” (Edward Phillips’s Dictionary of 1706). In The Beggar’s Opera (1728), John Gay refers to “the coquets of both sexes,” while the Monthly Review of 1770 commented revealingly on “One of those Narcissus-like, or Lady-like, gentlemen, called a male-coquet.” The term maintained its male form for about a century, although contexts and definitions refer to a jilt.
Various terms develop from meaning a pet or a toy to a woman. The primary meanings of doll , as given by the Oxford English Dictionary , are surprisingly chauvinist: “A pet form of the name Dorothy. Hence given generically to a female pet, a mistress. Also the smallest or pet dog in a litter (dialect).” About a century later, about 1700, came the modern senses of doll and dolly as a child’s plaything, and subsequently, from the mid-nineteenth century, the more damning use of “a pretty, but empty or frivolous woman.”
Animal terms form a major category. Bitch has developed a range of reference, although its most powerful application is still to a woman. Minx , of obscure origin, is used of a pet dog from about 1540, a pert girl or hussy from about 1592, and a whore from about 1598. In the past even sow did not have an exclusively female application, being used, in the words of the OED , of “a person (male or female) as a term of abuse.” As late as 1803 a Scottish song carries the line “You’re a sow auld man.”
Gypsy combines in its semantic development strains of both xenophobia and misogyny. The term arose in the early sixteenth century with the appearance of the Romanies, a dark-skinned race of Hindu origin assumed to have come from Egypt, the name itself being a corruption of Egyptian . A male sense of “a cunning rogue” appears briefly in the early sixteenth century, whereafter feminization and sexual deterioration set in. The sense of “a contemptuous term for a woman as being cunning, fickle, deceitful” is found from Shakespeare until the mid-nineteenth century. A similar pattern can be seen in the semantic development of tramp from “a male vagrant,” recorded from the seventeenth century, to “a sexually promiscuous woman” from the early twentieth.
The trend of feminization partly overlaps with that of moral deterioration in terms for women, covered in the entry for women, stereotypes of.
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