Ladies and lords: refitting the feminist model of pejoration

Originally posted on Language and Philosophy June 11, 2007

It’s become a chestnut of feminist linguistics — maybe it’s better to call it gender linguistics, to remove the politics from the science, if that’s possible or wise — that the frequent pejoration of words for disempowered people on the one hand, and the frequent pejoration of words denoting women on the other, strongly implies that women have been socially disempowered through the history of the language (as if one needed evidence for this!). Words like “knave,” which once meant simply ‘boy,’ and “villein” which meant merely ‘peasant’ have pejorated, and even “boy” is pejorating in exactly the way “knave” did: “I’ll get my boys on it” says the pop culture mobster, meaning not that he’ll get his male children to do it, but that he’ll get his servants, his henchmen.

I’m not going to contest the disempowerment of women, but I think the feminist correlation is too neat. The dynamics of pejoration seem to differ depending on the word, some showing signs of disempowerment, some not, so it is good to look at the cases one by one. I have in mind the female&male pairs

lady, lord

governess, governor

queen, king

madam, sir

princess, prince

all of which niftily show pejoration in the female-, not in the male-denoting word.

LADY

Starting with “lady,” the pejoration of which does, I think, show a gender difference in empowerment or prestige: the word began as a designation for the wife of the Anglo-Saxon chief. Each tribe cultivated its warriors, bringing them all under one roof of the chief’s house (remember King Lear and his rowdy entourage his daughters refused to host — Lear was an Anglo-Saxon king). In the warriors’ big house, the chief was the warden of the loaves, or “hlafweard,” (later “laward,” eventually “lord”) and she the loaf kneeder, the “hlafdige” (later “lavedi,” eventually “lady”). A difference in power and prestige is obvious at the origin. Even though labor is more essential to social survival, it is distinguished here from authority and possession which are handed to the male of the pair.

But “lady” was not without prestige. Most important, she and the lord were socially unique. There was but one lady per tribe. The closest equivalent in present-day English would be “queen.” Subordinate she may have been, but she received her tribe’s deference deflected from her husband.

Power relations changed under the Normans. The unique Anglo-Saxon chieftain was replaced with a class of superiors. Under occupation, all the occupiers may as well be kings with respect to the occupied. And the words “lord” and “lady” reflect this widening of denotation, but “lady” much more than “lord.” Feudal Norman male-oriented culture may have helped sustain the prestige and uniqueness of “lord” and while there were many Norman lords and ladies, there was still only one ruling lord in the land, but no corresponding ruling lady.

Dick Leith, in his Social History of English, tells a story of the replacement of informal “thou” with formal”you” in class-mobile industrial society where one never knows who is a genuine social superior and who is just new money, so people hedge their bets to err on the side of formality just in case. No doubt the same with “lady.” And again, the association of unique power to rule may have prevented “lord” from wallowing in such commonality. To have many ladies in ones social order may be an embarrassment of riches, but it is no contradiction. To have many lords is both. And so, today a lady is distinguished from the general class of adult females by the least mark of prestige. That it retains some prestige is evident from its ironic use in “ladies of the night,” which wouldn’t hold its humor and irony if it weren’t that whores don’t count in the usual inventory of the set denoted by “lady.”

The word today is full of surprising contrasts. As a common title of address it is formal but insulting:
Excuse me, lady (so demeaning it isn’t used anymore)
Compare:
Excuse me, miss (according to my students, always preferred to “ma’am”)
As a descriptor, it is distinguishable from “woman” only in its absence of sexual, warm-blooded connotation
It’s that lady over there
It’s that woman over there

Sensitivity to gender inequality is rendering this “lady” obsolete. It survives in “ladies and gentleman,” and in circumstances where “gentlemen” is perceived as too formal, “women” is often perceived as too human.
The men on the left, ladies to the right
though it can depend on the gender of the speaker — women in polite situations often seem to feel the need to show more delicacy addressing men and vice versa.

The standard denotation of “lady” has widened immensely, spreading its girth almost to cover the entire class of adult females, its only vestige of prestige its lack of human warmth and sexuality.

However, it has great vitality as a colloquialism, where its connotations of dignity and respect reappear. Your lady is your girlfriend. It’s a title that seems to combine endearment with deflected respect (my woman deserves the respect I demand for myself) and subordination all rolled into one. Not too far from “hlafedige.”

MADAM

As a term of address and a title, this word has not lost any more prestige than its male counterpart. The expansion of both reflects the decline from feudal rules to bourgeois pleasantries. It’s its use as a euphemism for the brothel administratrix that is claimed by feminists to distinguish “madam” from “sir.” It must be the power of the prestigious male that spares “sir” the place of “pimp.”

I don’t think so. Euphemism replaces an unacceptable word or covers an unacceptable idea with an acceptable word. (There are euideisms as well, but I leave that for another discussion.) There’s no eu if the stand-in word isn’t in itself acceptable and prestigious. In the case of “madam,” the denotation itself commands some respect. The pop culture image of the madam is full of dignity. She resembles nothing so much as an imperious, rigid, protective prioress of an abbey, and she’s usually tougher to bring down. The image of the pimp: a vile and villainous, cheaply and comically pretentious, tasteless and reprehensible predator. The pimp holds a special place in our culture. He is universally despised. There have been many sympathetic treatments of drug addicts, whores, indigents and criminals of all sorts, murderers, rapists, serial killers, even Hitler is probed for his motives and the possibility of an underlying human interest, but the pimp is such an unworthy worm no one will take his cause even to investigate his human motives. Why euphemize him? We don’t.

(A pander is a different person entirely.)

Euphemism as a road to pejoration doesn’t always prove disempowerment. But it does by definition prove the prestige of the euphemic word. If the euphemic word doesn’t have some prestige, then it can’t serve as a euphemism, there is no euphemism. Euphemisms have prestige by definition.

GOVERNESS

Another case of euphemism. And again, it is the prestige of the word and the (small) prestige of the position that invites the euphemy. And it’s not just a euphemism for baby-sitter or nanny: it pays better and provides better references and maybe even accommodations of an au pair. Apparently “governor” has undergone worse as “gov’nah” though not stateside, where governors all rule one or another of the fifty states of the union. Other uses of “governor” have an air of anachronism in the US.

The point here is not to deny that the female-denoting word has pejorated — it has — but to learn something from the particular process of pejoration. It is not enough to describe these euphemisms as simple reflections of lack of empowerment or prestige. Euphemism is a reflection of prestige, not its lack. The euphemism is dragged down by the denotation of the word it replaces, not by social disempowerment. It’s a case of no good deed going unpunished. The feminist story is not entirely wrong. It’s just partial.

QUEEN

Gender inequality is most evident here at the top. There’s no “queen of the mountain,” no female Elvis “the Queen,” no “Queen Kong.” The cross-gender epithet carries such an intensely negative implication, that one has to wonder whether males have commandeered social affect and mores in the language, here at least. Male disparagement of femininity is nowhere more evident than in this one epithet that equates everything anathema to manhood with womanhood, and not just womanhood, but the ultimate woman, the queen. The word virtue itself derives from Latin vir, ‘man.’ We’re at a puzzling place for the understanding of linguistic values. Mothers’ linguistic influence is surely greater on children, male or female, than fathers’. So what is the origin of this capitulation to maleness? Were women so thoroughly marginalized in common discourse? Were they treated as mere chattel? Judging from the language, they were.

More later, I have to get to rehearsal.

Does pejoration correlate with lack of power or value?

“Under what conditions do words pejorate?” is a good question and the answer is not obvious. Consider marked categories. The generic term for cattle is “cow,” for Daffy’s cousins, “duck” not “drake.” “Cow”, “duck” and “goose” are all words for the feminine category and for the generic, just as “man”, as in “mankind” or “man does not live by bread alone” is the male category and the generic. In the case of “man” the value is presumably inherited from the patriarchal culture, and in the case of animals we eat, from the far greater value of the females over the males.

There are counterexamples. “God” should be protected from pejoration, but “Oh my god”, “godawful” “an ungodly hour” are all commonplaces, let alone “God, what an idiot”, “Goddamnit” and “Good God, no!” etc. IOW, “God” is vulgar. “Boss” and “chief” are friendly replacements for the distant “sir”.

I haven’t looked carefully at every decline. Maybe AI will have time for that. I leave you with this: “bro” is at best a neutral replacement for “man” and carries lots of negative connotations: “fratbros” denote callous, often drunk and sexually irresponsible, not to say vile, “brocialists” – arrogant activists who cite Lenin and flaunt their revolutionary cred arrogantly and forcefully in every group – is clearly a pejorative as is “broscience”, mistaking youtube snake oil for physiology. Meanwhile, “sis” is surely the most beautiful term of endearment in the English language. I’ve asked my students to call me “cis”, but they never do.