Suboptimist

Womyn

Good news everyone, I have something new to be annoyed by.

First of all my faithful reader(s) should note that I am either a feminist or at least sympathetic to feminism, however something happened today that almost made me want to go home and brood while listening to one of the Reverend’s misogyny mixes. For the first time in my life, I came upon an idiosyncratic spelling of women. It was spelled womyn.

This is one of many alternative spellings employed by some more radical feminists, others include femal < female and humyn < human, etc., and I find it really irritating. The intention of these spellings is supposedly to fight back the subordination of women through language containing words like “-man/-men,” i.e., classifying women as a subset of men. That’s not what these words do. It’s a complete, unadulterated accident that woman bears any similarity to man and female bears any similarity to male, and so forth. Woman comes from O.E. wimman < wifman, which was a compound of wif ‘woman’ and man ‘person’ (the word for man was originally wer). Female comes from Latin femella ‘woman’ and male comes from Latin masculis ‘man.’ Human from Latin hominis ‘human.’ Oh dear, what’s a gyrl to do against facts like these…

A couple more points: let’s pretend that the above words were coined with the intention to subordinate women. In that case, changing the spelling wouldn’t do anything, since we would still pronounce the words the same way — the root remains the same. This is just a ridiculous attempt at pop-Whorfianism, trying to remove grammatical gender in order to liberate women. If you don’t know how the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis works, don’t cite it. Oh, and did you know that Farsi (spoken in Iran) lacks grammatical gender? Women there are the most liberated on the planet.

Anyway, my summer is looking pretty decent, though it’s getting kind of busy all of the sudden. I am trying to get some Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac work in on the weekends, and I started reading The Lord of the Rings again. P.S. Only a few people will understand why this is funny (ZOMG mage nerf!)