We still crave labels. Linguists say that this has everything to do with the power of words to legitimize experiences, as if an idea only becomes valid once it’s christened with a title.

Scholars have a clever word for this kind of social structure in which power is formed through a brotherhood that objectifies and dehumanizes those on the outside: they call it fratriarchy. Many think this is a more accurate way to describe our culture’s post-feudal system, which is ruled not by the fathers, but by peer networks of the brothers.

people have the genders that they do because of the way they talk and the feedback they receive from that talk. Language brings gender to life.

“Language is not always about making an argument or conveying information in the cleanest, simplest way possible. It’s often about building relationships. It’s about making yourself understood and trying to understand someone else.”

Young women use the linguistic features that they do, not as mindless affectations, but as power tools for establishing and strengthening relationships.

Almost nothing about our identities can be defined on such rigid terms—gender included. If you’re a woman, you’re a person who self-identifies as a woman, no matter what your body, mannerisms, or style of dress look like.

Linguists know that nonstandard forms of a language are not objectively “bad.” The grammatical forms themselves, like saying “he be”* instead of “he is,” are not inherently worse or better than what we learned in English class. They’re simply stigmatized based on how we feel about the type of person using them.

A 2017 study of body-camera footage revealed that police officers were 61 percent more likely to use low-respect language, such as informal titles like “my man,” with black drivers than they were with white drivers. Interactions like this are not a sign of affection or something the recipient should be flattered by. Because really, they’re just a

Sociolinguists agree the creation of these different categories is connected to a deeper human desire to typologize species—to identify groups of living things, sort them, and try to figure out what their relationship is to one another. It’s a form of taxonomy: we create these labels to help make sense of the world around us and ourselves.