English Oddity
I've not posted as much as I have in the past. I truly miss the five day a week posts, but I have unfortunateness in every quarter of my life now and really feel the need to get lost in the woods. Sometimes, that's the only way to find a clear path.
That out of the way, let's let paragraph two be a warning: The rest of this post not only contains foul language, it is ABOUT foul language. I don't typically use foul language in my posts. I find that the foul language on my blog is in the comments section, where the unwashed masses tell me how much I suck. I may suck, but you still read it. Thank you for your post. I find foul language to be a shortcut to emotional meaning, and on my blog I tend to like to get their the long way around. I'm like that with a lot of things. I have never flown. I have no fear of flying, but when I go somewhere I want to experience the journey fully. Flying like cursing is a shortcut to a destination. I'm using foul language in this one. You have been warned.
One of the things I learned in my six years of failing French in college is that Romance languages have gendered nouns. Car is masculine in French, "Le Car". That's a joke by the way "la voiture" is feminine. Le Car is crap in any language. Car is feminine in all languages. In English where there is no gendered noun convention, all forms of mechanized transportation tend to be referred to as "She", usually as a term of endearment. Book is masculine in French, "le livre". But I digress.
They say that English isn't a gendered language. I think they are fucking morons. All curse words fall into three genders; masculine, feminine, and neutral. In the above sentence "I think they are fucking morons." "Fucking" is a neutral adjective used to describe the plural morons- which they are.
I can say "he's an asshole", but I can't really call her an asshole because asshole is masculine. I would have to use "bitch" which is the feminine term for the shortcut that caused you to use the curse word in the first place. The interesting thing is that, if I call a guy an asshole its OK, if I call a woman an asshole I'm a fucking moron. If I say she's a bitch its fine, but if I call a guy a bitch its probably a term of endearment. Unless I call him a "little bitch" which instead of being endearing is me saying that not only is he an an asshole he's a woman. Calling a woman a woman isn't necessarily a bad thing. Calling a man a woman is most definitely a bad thing. This is doubly true if they aren't trying to look and act like a woman. Calling a woman a man is like calling a dog an aardvark, it is a non-sequitur, it doesn't work. In order to be derogatorily about a woman's femininity you have to call her a dyke which is odd. I was going to make a joke here about my confusion about comparing a masculine woman to a wall designed to hold back water, but instead I went to wikipedia and became even more confused. I'm backing away slowly.
Masculine: dick, dickhead, fuck, fucker, fuckhead, ass, asshole, asshat, shit, shithead, shit for brains, the list goes on and on and on. There is a HUGE list of masculine predicates for the purposes of showing disrespect. Many of them have to do with bodily functions and sexual organs.
The list of feminine predicates is much shorter and on the whole I think the words tend to be more taboo. Bitch is about the nicest of the damned here. There are words on this list I won't use in conversation among close trusted friends, and I certainly won't use it in writing, even on a blog.
Slang of the penis is always masculine. Interestingly, slang for female sexual organs is almost but not entirely always masculine also. He is a boob. He is a pussy. Any slang for feminine organs used as a feminine predicate that I can think of are taboo, at least to me. George Carlin said one, but you can't repeat it on television- unless it is cable.
Douche, douche bag, masculine. Try it think about some guy that you dislike and think to yourself, "He's such a douche bag." It works! Now try it with some woman you dislike, "She's such a douche bag." It doesn't work. Does that seem right to you? A douche bag is a sack that holds a vinegar and water solution used for the cleaning of lady parts. One could say that if the liquid is transferred from the bag to the place it goes its gone from a plastic bag to a flesh one. Crude, tasteless, tacky, wrong, but not entirely inaccurate. Yet actually calling a woman a douche bag is incorrect. Douche bag is masculine.
Thus, while the English language doesn't have gendered nouns, in the realm of foul language the predicate is clearly gendered.
Some graduate student in English is about to read this and get inspired. When they write their thesis on it they probably won't credit me, though they'll credit George Carlin. George Carlin is an important social commentator, I'm just a fucking douche bag with a blog.
