Etymology in Gender

By Jason Pickett

Knowing how a society works and how its people think, almost always means knowing the language the society uses. Knowing the history of that language and its words gives one a great insight to the language itself. It lets one know how a language came about, who it came from, and how the users of it thought. It is often my impression that people who complain about the use of the language generally do not take the initiative to educate themselves thoroughly as to why a language is constructed the way it is. Generally there are a lot of logical and unexpected reasons as to why things are in a society. Too often we take time to describe a language as being biased in some way or another, refraining to actually understand it and the reasoning for its occurrence. To this end I have made an attempt to correct that in at least one field, gender and the words that it uses.

Words of gender, and pertaining to gender usually have long and complex histories. Those words that are now considered profane, have not always been seen as such, especially pertaining to gender. A lot of times specific groups such as feminist ones will attack our current lexicon for showing preference or bias toward one sex, while ignoring the reason why, or perhaps that the language really is not sexist, but it only appears to be so out of coincidence. Words are thought to be marked, like female, but etymologically speaking ‘female’ and ‘male’ are not related at all… interestingly they are both diminutives of their Latin predecessors. There are sometimes when a word is distinctly marked as being initially ‘male’ or ‘female’. Gender in particular has interesting etymologies to its words and when understood fully by those who wish to change it, only then can the language of gender be reasonably complained about.

In my research I came across 127 terms I could actually find the etymologies for. Fifty-five of these were male, sixty-five were female, and seven were neuter… but the lack of neuter terms could most likely be attributed to the fact that it is difficult to know specifically to look up under neuter, especially that pertains to sex. Males had nineteen derogatory or bad names associated with them, whereas women had fourteen in all. Percentage wise it looks even worse for men with 35% of the words being bad ones, as opposed to women’s 22%. There were no bad neuter words that I looked at specifically, but I tried to keep neuter down to words that are being used to replace one sex or the other’s traditional use as the generic word: specifically ‘man’ by ‘person’.

Some of the most interesting etymologies from the male terms were those of: bastard, chauvinist, drag queen, faggot, fellow, guy, lord, man, penis, scrotum and testis. Testis in particular is humorous to me, because it comes from the word meaning to bare witness, which implies that the testicles of men bare witness to the penis during sex. For female terms the most interesting etymologies were: broad, butch, clitoris, dyke, female, hag, hooker, lady, prostitute, pussy, vagina, and vulva. For neuter I found only the word person to be of real interest, and from a rather unexpected source, meaning mask because back in the ancient theatre one actor would have to display several different people by wearing different masks. Something of interesting to note, is the most scientific words for male and female genitalia respectively have odd connotations. Specifically, the penis has been seen by many societies as a weapon, or representative of weapons, and the origin of the vagina as ‘sheath’ seems to suggest that is true, however; the word ‘penis’ in etymology comes from the word Latin word for ‘tail’, not having much to do with weapons at all.

I could not find the specific etymologies of the suffices for ‘tor’, ‘tress’, ‘trix’ and ‘ette’, but happen to know most of their origins anyway, as I have taken two years of Latin thus far. ‘Tor’ is simply the masculine and generic agentive suffix for many Latin words. ‘Tress’ comes from ‘trix’ which comes from the feminine agentive suffix for Latin positions, ‘tress’ in English is much more common with words like ‘actress’, ‘waitress’ and so forth, but ‘trix’ still exists in words such as ‘aviatrix’ and ‘dominatrix’. ‘ette’ is a little more tricky to understand, but I think it is an adaptation from ‘tress’ and perhaps more of a diminutive. Other specific suffices I could not think of at least not pertaining specifically to gender.

I must apologise if there are any words I left out of my list, I could not remember each one to put in. Some words I left out, because their relation to what they were describing was more obvious, for instance the word ‘hole’ for ‘vagina’. I must also apologise if this paper seems rather profane, but I believe it is not only interesting to know the origins of those words, but how they were first used, in order to discover the way our ancestors thought about such words themselves. Something interesting to note as well, is that most terms date back about the 1930’s at the latest, with few exceptions. Many of the terms commonly believed to be relatively new are from as late as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Knowing a language’s etymology and wench the words come, gives you a much better command of one’s own language. Often times knowing the roots and bases of the words of one’s own language can help him to not only have a better command of the words he chooses to use, but also can help him understand words with which he is not yet familiar. Knowing that ‘hyster’ (meaning womb) for one can be useful for understanding other words like ‘hysterectomy’, and ‘hysteria’ etc. I do not mean to lecture about the importance of etymology, but I feel that for this specific paper it is quite relevant, to show my interest in the subject and also to demonstrate the specific importance of studying this for a course in gender and language.

That pretty much concludes my report, I hope it was enlightening to you who reads this. The real information is in the appendix, which I believe would be worth it to see by itself. Having a great understanding of history is always one of my chief ambitions throughout life, and I believe that this report gave me personally a clearer understanding of it, so for that I am very happy for this project as a chance to research and moreover the push for me to research this, which I have desired to know for a long time. In future, I hope to know more terms, and perhaps I will research the terms I had forgotten to research. I hope this satisfied those who have taken enough interest to look at it and perhaps inspired you to research more on this subject forth hence by yourselves.

Bibliography: All etymologies save andro (which I wrote), came from: Harper, Douglas. Online Etymological Dictionary © 2000 24 April 2002.