On the other hand, the old-fashioned prudery which prevented ladies from using such words as legs and trousers (“those manly garments which are rarely mentioned by name,” says Dickens, Dombey, 335) is now rightly looked upon as exaggerated and more or less comical (cf. my GS § 247).
There can be no doubt that women exercise a great and universal influence on linguistic development through their instinctive shrinking from coarse and gross expressions and their preference for refined and (in certain spheres) veiled and indirect expressions. In most cases that influence will be exercised privately and in the bosom of the family; but there is one historical instance in which a group of women worked in that direction publicly and collectively; I refer to those French ladies who in the seventeenth century gathered in the Hôtel de Rambouillet and are generally known under the name of Précieuses. They discussed questions of spelling and of purity of pronunciation and diction, and favoured all kinds of elegant paraphrases by which coarse and vulgar words might be avoided. In many ways this movement was the counterpart of the literary wave which about that time was inundating Europe under various names—Gongorism in Spain, Marinism in Italy, Euphuism in England; but the Précieuses went further than their male confrères in desiring to influence everyday language. When, however, they used such expressions as, for ‘nose,’ ‘the door of the brain,’ for ‘broom’ ‘the instrument of cleanness,’ and for ‘shirt’ ‘the constant companion of the dead and the living’ (la compagne perpétuelle des morts et des vivants), and many others, their affectation called down on their heads a ripple of laughter, and their endeavours would now have been forgotten but for the immortal satire of Molière in Les Précieuses ridicules and Les Femmes savantes. But apart from such exaggerations the feminine point of view is unassailable, and there is reason to congratulate those nations, the English among them, in which the social position of women has been high enough to secure greater purity and freedom from coarseness in language than would have been the case if men had been the sole arbiters of speech.
Among the things women object to in language must be specially mentioned anything that smacks of swearing[54]; where a man will say “He told an infernal lie,” a woman will rather say, “He told a most dreadful fib.” Such euphemistic substitutes for the simple word ‘hell’ as ‘the other place,’ ‘a very hot’ or ‘a very uncomfortable place’ probably originated with women. They will also use ever to add emphasis to an interrogative pronoun, as in “Whoever told you that?” or “Whatever do you mean?” and avoid the stronger ‘who the devil’ or ‘what the dickens.’ For surprise we have the feminine exclamations ‘Good gracious,’ ‘Gracious me,’ ‘Goodness gracious,’ ‘Dear me’ by the side of the more masculine ‘Good heavens,’ ‘Great Scott.’ ‘To be sure’ is said to be more frequent with women than with men. Such instances might be multiplied, but these may suffice here. It will easily be seen that we have here civilized counterparts of what was above mentioned as sexual tabu; but it is worth noting that the interdiction in these cases is ordained by the women themselves, or perhaps rather by the older among them, while the young do not always willingly comply.
Men will certainly with great justice object that there is a danger of the language becoming languid and insipid if we are always to content ourselves with women’s expressions, and that vigour and vividness count for something. Most boys and many men have a dislike to some words merely because they feel that they are used by everybody and on every occasion: they want to avoid what is commonplace and banal and to replace it by new and fresh expressions, whose very newness imparts to them a flavour of their own. Men thus become the chief renovators of language, and to them are due those changes by which we sometimes see one term replace an older one, to give way in turn to a still newer one, and so on. Thus we see in English that the old verb weorpan, corresponding to G. werfen, was felt as too weak and therefore supplanted by cast, which was taken from Scandinavian; after some centuries cast was replaced by the stronger throw, and this now, in the parlance of boys especially, is giving way to stronger expressions like chuck and fling. The old verbs, or at any rate cast, may be retained in certain applications, more particularly in some fixed combinations and in figurative significations, but it is now hardly possible to say, as Shakespeare does, “They cast their caps up.” Many such innovations on their first appearance are counted as slang, and some never make their way into received speech; but I am not in this connexion concerned with the distinction between slang and recognized language, except in so far as the inclination or disinclination to invent and to use slang is undoubtedly one of the “human secondary sexual characters.” This is not invalidated by the fact that quite recently, with the rise of the feminist movement, many young ladies have begun to imitate their brothers in that as well as in other respects.
XIII.—§ 8. Vocabulary.
This trait is indissolubly connected with another: the vocabulary of a woman as a rule is much less extensive than that of a man. Women move preferably in the central field of language, avoiding everything that is out of the way or bizarre, while men will often either coin new words or expressions or take up old-fashioned ones, if by that means they are enabled, or think they are enabled, to find a more adequate or precise expression for their thoughts. Woman as a rule follows the main road of language, where man is often inclined to turn aside into a narrow footpath or even to strike out a new path for himself. Most of those who are in the habit of reading books in foreign languages will have experienced a much greater average difficulty in books written by male than by female authors, because they contain many more rare words, dialect words, technical terms, etc. Those who want to learn a foreign language will therefore always do well at the first stage to read many ladies’ novels, because they will there continually meet with just those everyday words and combinations which the foreigner is above all in need of, what may be termed the indispensable small-change of a language.
This may be partly explicable from the education of women, which has up to quite recent times been less comprehensive and technical than that of men. But this does not account for everything, and certain experiments made by the American professor Jastrow would tend to show that we have here a trait that is independent of education. He asked twenty-five university students of each sex, belonging to the same class and thus in possession of the same preliminary training, to write down as rapidly as possible a hundred words, and to record the time. Words in sentences were not allowed. There were thus obtained 5,000 words, and of these many were of course the same. But the community of thought was greater in the women; while the men used 1,375 different words, their female class-mates used only 1,123. Of 1,266 unique words used, 29·8 per cent. were male, only 20·8 per cent. female. The group into which the largest number of the men’s words fell was the animal kingdom; the group into which the largest number of the women’s words fell was wearing apparel and fabrics; while the men used only 53 words belonging to the class of foods, the women used 179. “In general the feminine traits revealed by this study are an attention to the immediate surroundings, to the finished product, to the ornamental, the individual, and the concrete; while the masculine preference is for the more remote, the constructive, the useful, the general and the abstract.” (See Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman, 4th ed., London, 1904, p. 189.)
Another point mentioned by Jastrow is the tendency to select words that rime and alliterative words; both these tendencies were decidedly more marked in men than in women. This shows what we may also notice in other ways, that men take greater interest in words as such and in their acoustic properties, while women pay less attention to that side of words and merely take them as they are, as something given once for all. Thus it comes that some men are confirmed punsters, while women are generally slow to see any point in a pun and scarcely ever perpetrate one themselves. Or, to get to something of greater value: the science of language has very few votaries among women, in spite of the fact that foreign languages, long before the reform of female education, belonged to those things which women learnt best in and out of schools, because, like music and embroidery, they were reckoned among the specially feminine ‘accomplishments.’
Woman is linguistically quicker than man: quicker to learn, quicker to hear, and quicker to answer. A man is slower: he hesitates, he chews the cud to make sure of the taste of words, and thereby comes to discover similarities with and differences from other words, both in sound and in sense, thus preparing himself for the appropriate use of the fittest noun or adjective.