Sublime

As Deborah Cameron once said, “Teaching young women to accommodate to the linguistic preferences, aka prejudices, of the men who run law firms and engineering companies is doing the patriarchy’s work for it.” It accepts the idea that “feminine” speech is the problem, rather than the sexist attitudes toward it. “The business of feminism is surely to

English was always borrowed, from hip-hop to Spanglish to The Simpsons. Early on, my father learned that in America, one must be emotionally demonstrative to succeed, so he has a habit of saying “I love you” indiscriminately, to his daughters, to his employees, to his customers, and to airline personnel.

Ultimately, language can serve as a rather blatant means of otherizing all things feminine.

lingering feminine/affective, rather than feminist, connotations.

journalism becomes most effective when it prompts public awareness, inspires reflection and spurs dialogue.

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

devaluation of “feminized” mass culture.

Under American women’s influence, he insisted, language risks becoming a ‘generalised mumble or jumble, a tongueless slobber or snarl or whine’; it will sound like ‘the moo of the cow, the bray of the ass, and the bark of the dog’.

Is language reflective of a culture’s values and worldview, or does it limit the possibilities of experience?