Curzan says this is the word she turns to. And whereas knocked up can describe something that is defeated or bankrupt, pregnant describes phenomena that are full of meaning and promise. One obvious answer is to just say pregnant. But we can choose to use language that avoids limiting undertones. Words people use every day, like bulldozer, have far darker histories. There’s no need to b an all the terms that popped into my head when I sat down to write that note. Consciously or not, women surrender to a lot of this terminology because it’s what’s in general use.” “We kind of submit, from a very early age, to the idea that men’s perspectives are the most worth listening to,” says Amanda Montell, author of Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language. These include pooching out, gonna pop, as big as a barrel, getting broad in the hips, filling out her clothes and lumpy. And a long list focused on the fact that a woman is getting larger, in ways that seem less like a celebration of growth than the product of men scrutinizing women’s bodies. More still - like in a delicate condition and going to be confined - painted pregnancy primarily as a disability. Others fell into the euphemism category ( in a certain condition, that way), suggesting that pregnancy’s defining feature is being an embarrassment. These include phrases like banged up and jacked up, as well as descriptions like in a fix, up a tree and shot in the tail figures of speech like she’s out of circulation and she’s gone and done it as well as the more succinct bound, sewed up and poisoned. Rather than exalting this state of being, many emphasize “the limitations of the condition, this condition we feel the need to manage and police and define for people,” says Angela Garbes, author of Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy.įor example: Many of the words I found evoked the same spirit as knocked up, the objectifying viewpoint that a pregnant woman is damaged, lacking freedom or failing. “Language asks us to notice particular things,” she says.īecause men have had outsized influence on the language everyone uses, many phrases we use to describe pregnancy focus on less flattering things men have seen when looking at pregnant women. And the words we use to describe it highlight certain aspects and viewpoints, at the expense of others. With the help of resources like Green’s Dictionary of Slang and The Dictionary of American Regional English, I collected more than a hundred, current and obsolete, and sent selections to some experts on pregnancy and language.Īnne Curzan, a professor of English at the University of Michigan, pointed out an opportunity cost that each presented: Pregnancy is complicated. To better understand the history at play, I went looking for every synonym for pregnant that I could find. So what do we do? We can start by encouraging women to exert more influence over the language of pregnancy than they’ve had in the past. While a euphemism like expecting is polite, it is also a reminder that women’s sexuality, and the results of it, have been thought of as shameful. When they did, they might wear “maternity corsets” that squeezed their swelling bellies out of sight. In previous centuries, it was scandalous for pregnant women to appear in public. Terms like expecting and in a family way are more notable for what they don’t say, operating as vague descriptors that gloss over a truth long considered unseemly: women have sex. So it’s not surprising that bun in the oven places pregnant women in the kitchen. For decades, women were celebrated for getting pregnant and discouraged from pursuing careers. ![]() The phrase took off in the wake of World War II, when women who had been working were expected to head back home, leaving the jobs to the men and tending to families instead. But it’s also stuffed with domestic undertones. ![]() ![]() But using that formula to describe pregnancy makes the woman sound more like a receptacle than an equal. Since the 1500s, “to knock” a woman has meant to have sex with her, and the same word has been used to suggest a man is going to “knock a child out of her.” Many slang words for sex boil down to a man assailing a woman (consider: bang, hammer, tear off a piece, etc.), which is bad enough. There are few human events as longstanding or consequential, yet widespread language we use to describe this phenomenon - in all its glory and anxiety, all its pain and productivity - is underwhelming. What I sensed then was what I found to be true as I researched further: Common terms we use to describe pregnancy are laced with demeaning attitudes toward women.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |