Writing Guidelines

Introduction

Language both reflects and shapes society. Culture shapes language and then language shapes culture. Little wonder that the words we use to talk to each other, and about each other, are the most important words in our language: they tell us who I am, they tell us who you are, they tell us who “they” are.

Rabbi Donna Berman says, “Language doesn’t merely reflect the world, it creates it.” She points out that like the eye that can’t see itself, we have trouble seeing our language because it is our “eye.”

The process of looking at our language, discussing it, and debating it increases our awareness of the social inequities and of the truths reflected by our word choices. There can certainly be no solution to the problem of discrimination in society on the level of language alone. Replacing handicap with disability does not mean a person with disabilities will find a job more easily. Using nurse inclusively does not change the fact that only 12 percent of U.S. nurses are men. Replacing black and white in our vocabularies will not dislodge racism. However, research indicates that language powerfully influences attitudes, behavior, and perceptions. To ignore this factor in social change would be to hobble all other efforts.

The language we need to hone is the language of our differences. We have either insisted that we are all the same here in the United States (“the melting pot”) or we have been judgmental about our differences.

Poet Pat Parker (“For the White Person Who Wants to Know How to Be My Friend”) said it best: “The first thing you do is to forget that i’m Black. / Second, you must never forget that i’m Black.” In the same way, we acknowledge our differences with respect and our samenesses with joy. “Unity, not uniformity, must be our aim. We attain unity only through variety. Differences must be integrated, not annihilated, nor absorbed” (Mary Parker Follett).

Definition of Terms

Bias/bias-free

Biased language refers to people in imbalanced or inaccurate ways: (1) It leaves out certain individuals or groups. “Employees are welcome to bring their wives and children” leaves out those employees who might want to bring husbands, friends, or same-sex partners, and it implies at some level that everyone has wives and children. (2) It makes unwarranted assumptions. To write “Anyone can use this fire safety ladder” assumes that all members of the household have full function of their arms and legs. “Flesh-colored” assumes everyone is one color. Addressing a sales letter about diapers to the mother assumes that the father won’t be diapering the baby. (3) It calls individuals and groups by names or labels that they did not choose for themselves (for example, office girl, Eskimo, the elderly) or that are derogatory (illegal, slut, psycho). (4) It is based on stereotypes that imply that all lesbians/Chinese/women/people with disabilities/men/teenagers are alike (adolescent behavior, male ego, hot-blooded Latins). (5) It treats groups in nonparallel ways in the same context: Asian Americans, African Americans, and whites; two men and a female. (6) It categorizes certain people when it is unnecessary to do so and when this is not done for other people: the black defendant when it is never the white defendant; the woman lawyer when it is never the man lawyer. As soon as we mention sex, ethnicity, religion, disability, or any other characteristic—without a good reason for doing so—we are on thin ice. Although there may be instances in which a person’s sex, for example, is germane (“A recent study showed that female patients do not object to being cared for by male nurses”), most of the time it is not. Nor is a person’s race, sexual orientation, disability, age, or belief system often relevant. “As a general rule, it is good to remember that … you should ordinarily view people as individuals and not mention their racial, ethnic, or other status, unless it is important to your larger purpose in communicating” (American Heritage Book of English Usage).

Jean Gaddy Wilson (in Working with Words, also written by Brian S. Brooks and James L. Pinson) suggests, “Following one simple rule of writing or speaking will eliminate most biases. Ask yourself: Would you say the same thing about an affluent, white man?”

Inclusive/exclusive

Inclusive language clearly includes everyone it intends to include; exclusive language intentionally or unintentionally excludes some people. The following quotation is inclusive: “The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives” (William James). It is clear that James is speaking of all of us.

Examples of sex-exclusive writing fill most quotation books: “Man is the measure of all things” (Protagoras). “The People, though we think of a great entity when we use the word, means nothing more than so many millions of individual men” (James Bryce). “Man is nature’s sole mistake” (W. S. Gilbert).

Sexist/nonsexist

Sexist language promotes and maintains attitudes that stereotype people according to gender while assuming that the male is the norm—the significant gender. Nonsexist language treats both sexes equally and either does not refer to a person’s sex when it is irrelevant or refers to men and women and to girls and boys in symmetrical ways.

“A society in which women are taught anything but the management of a family, the care of men, and the creation of the future generation is a society which is on the way out” (L. Ron Hubbard). “Behind every successful man is a woman—with nothing to wear” (L. Grant Glickman). “Nothing makes a man and wife feel closer, these days, than a joint tax return” (Gil Stern). These quotations display various characteristics of sexist writing: (1) stereotyping an entire sex by what might be appropriate for some of it; (2) assuming male superiority; (3) using unparallel terms (for example, man and wife should be either husband and wife or man and woman).

The following quotations clearly refer to both sexes: “It’s really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs” (J. D. Salinger). “If people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, nobody’s going to stop them” (Yogi Berra). “People keep telling us about their love affairs, when what we really want to know is how much money they make and how they manage on it” (Mignon McLaughlin). “I studied the lives of great men and famous women, and I found that the men and women who got to the top were those who did the jobs they had in hand, with everything they had of energy and enthusiasm and hard work” (Harry S. Truman).

Gender-free/gender-fair/gender-specific

Gender-free terms do not indicate sex and can be used for either women/girls or men/boys (teacher, bureaucrat, employee, hiker, operations manager, child, clerk, sales rep, hospital patient, student, grandparent, chief executive officer).

Gender-fair language involves the symmetrical use of gender-specific words (Ms. Cortright/Mr. Lopez, councilwoman/councilman, young man/young woman) and promotes fairness to both sexes in the larger context. To ensure gender-fairness, ask yourself: Would I write the same thing in the same way about a person of the other sex? Would I mind if this were said of me? If you are describing the behavior of children on the playground, to be gender-fair you will refer to girls and boys an approximately equal number of times, and you will carefully observe what the children do, and not just assume that only the boys will climb to the top of the jungle gym and that only the girls will play quiet games. Researchers studying the same baby described its cries as “anger” when they were told it was a boy and as “fear” when they were told it was a girl (cited in Cheris Kramarae, ed., The Voices and Words of Women and Men).

Gender-specific words (councilwoman, businessman, altar girl) are neither good nor bad in themselves, but they sometimes identify and even emphasize a person’s sex when it is not necessary (and is sometimes even objectionable) to do so. Male and female versions of a root word are also likely to be weighted quite differently (governor/governess, master/mistress).

One problem with gender-free terms, however, is that they sometimes obscure reality. Battered spouse implies that men and women are equally battered; this is far from true. Parent is too often taken to mean mother and obscures the fact that more and more fathers are involved in parenting; sometimes it is better here to use the gender-specific fathers and mothers or mothers and fathers than the gender-neutral parents. Saying businesswomen and businessmen instead of business executives reminds us that there are women involved, whereas business executives evokes a picture of men for most of us.

Amanda Smith (in The Albuquerque Tribune) writes, “A word like ‘legislator’ does not exclude women, but neither does it do anything to change the mental picture for some who already see legislators as male.” She tells the story of teachers who took two groups of children to opposite ends of the playground: one group was told they were going to build “snowmen”; they made 11 snowmen and 1 snowwoman. The other group was told they were going to build “snow figures”; that group made 5 snowmen, 3 snowwomen, 2 snow dogs, 1 snow horse, and 1 snow spaceship.

Generic/pseudogeneric

A generic is an all-purpose word that includes everybody (for example, workers, people, voters, civilians, elementary school students). Generic pronouns include we, you, they.

A pseudogeneric is a word used as if it included everybody but that in reality does not. For example, “A Muslim people of the northern Caucasus, the 1.3 million Chechens are dark-haired and tawny skinned, often with lush mustaches” (The New York Times International). Until you get to the “lush mustaches,” you assume “Chechens” is generic, including both women and men. Explaining why he felt homeless people who aren’t in shelters should be locked up, Pat Buchanan (cited in New Woman) said, “I don’t think we should have to have them wandering the streets frightening women and people.”

Words like “everyone” are often used as if “everyone” can afford a new television, celebrates Christmas, can walk up stairs, is married or wants to be, can read, gets enough to eat, worries about a sunburn, and so on. Pseudogenerics are thought to include everyone because the people who use them are thinking only of themselves and their immediate world.

When someone says, “What a Christian thing to do!” (meaning kind or good-hearted), it leaves out all kind, good-hearted people who are not Christian. The speaker is undoubtedly a Christian and assumes others are too. Similarly, assuming everyone gets rosy-cheeked and goes pale in the same way ignores our diverse skin colors. When words like mankind, forefathers, brotherhood, and alumni got a foothold in the language, it was because men were visible, men were in power, and that’s what their world looked like.

Certain nouns that look generic are often used as if they mean only men (politicians, lawyers, voters, legislators, clergy, farmers, colonists, immigrants, slaves, pioneers, settlers, members of the armed forces, judges, taxpayers). References to “settlers, their wives, and children,” or “those clergy permitted to have wives” illustrate this.

See the sections below on the two most damaging pseudogenerics: “man” and “he.”

Sex/gender

In general, sex may be thought of as a physical, physiological, biological attribute.

Gender is cultural: a society’s notions of “masculine” are based on how it expects men to behave, and its notions of “feminine” are based on how it expects women to behave. Words like womanly/manly, tomboy/sissy, unfeminine/unmasculine have nothing to do with the person’s sex; they are culturally determined, subjective concepts about sex-appropriate traits and behaviors, which vary from one place to another and even from one individual to another within a culture.

Gender is a subjective cultural attitude. Sex is an objective biological fact. Gender concepts vary according to the culture. Sex is, with some exceptions, a constant.

The difference between sex and gender is important because much sexist language arises from cultural determinations of what a female or male “ought” to be. When a society believes, for example, that being a man means to hide one’s emotions, bring home a paycheck, and be able to discuss football standings whereas being a woman means to be soft-spoken, to “never have anything to wear,” and to love shopping, babies, and recipes, much of the population becomes a contradiction in terms—unmanly men and unwomanly women. Crying, nagging, gossiping, and shrieking are assumed to be women’s lot; rough-housing, beer drinking, telling dirty jokes, and being unable to find one’s socks and keys are laid at men’s collective door. Lists of stereotypes appear silly because very few people fit them. The best way to ensure unbiased writing and speaking is to describe people as individuals, not as members of a set.

General Guidelines

Pseudogeneric “he”

The use of he to mean he or she is ambiguous, the grammatical justification for its use is problematic, and it is not perceived as including both women and men. A number of careful studies have shown that women, men, and children alike picture only males when he is used to mean everyone. “It is clear that, in spite of the best efforts of prescriptive grammarians, he has not come to be either used or understood in the generic sense under most circumstances” (Philip M. Smith, Language, the Sexes and Society). Donald G. McKay (in Cheris Kramarae, ed., The Voices and Words of Women and Men) says that each of us hears the pseudogeneric he over a million times in our lifetime and that the consequences of this kind of repetition are “beyond the ken of present-day psychology.” He describes pseudogeneric he as having all the characteristics of a highly effective propaganda technique: repetition, covertness/indirectness, early age of acquisition, and association with high-prestige sources; “Although the full impact of the prescriptive he remains to be explored, effects on attitudes related to achievement, motivation, perseverance, and level of aspiration seem likely.” Linguist Suzette Haden Elgin gives this example of a pseudogeneric he with important consequences: “Every American child knows that he may grow up to be President.”

Young children, who are unfamiliar with the grammatical rule that says he really means he or she, and who are also fairly literal-minded, hear he thousands of times and come to think of maleness as the general state of being and femaleness as something peripheral. In a study by Steven Gelb of Toronto’s York University, young children were asked to describe pictures of sex-indeterminate bunnies, dinosaurs, and babies; 97 percent of the time boys labeled them male, and 81 percent of the time the girls also labeled them male. When parents and teachers use pseudogeneric he to refer to people, they inadvertently teach youngsters that maleness and humanness are equivalent.

The ubiquity of he is not to be underestimated. When the Minnesota legislature ordered the removal of gender-specific language from state statutes, the Office of the Revisor of Statutes deleted or replaced some 20,000 sex-specific pronouns; only 301 of them were feminine.

The pronoun he (when used in any way except to refer to a specific male person) can be avoided in several ways.

Rewrite your sentence in the plural: “It’s the educated barbarian who is the worst: he knows what to destroy” (Helen MacInnes). Educated barbarians are the worst; they know what to destroy. “When someone sings his own praises, he always gets the tune too high” (Mary H. Waldrip). Those who sing their own praises always get the tune too high.

Omit the pronoun entirely: “Repartee: What a person thinks of after he becomes a departee” (Dan Bennett). Repartee: What a person thinks of after becoming a departee. “The American arrives in Paris with a few French phrases he has culled from a conversational guide or picked up from a friend who owns a beret” (Fred Allen). The American arrives in Paris with a few French phrases culled from a conversational guide or picked up from a friend who owns a beret.

Substitute we/us/our: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” (Karl Marx). From each of us according to our abilities, to each of us according to our needs.

Use the second person: “No man knows his true character until he has run out of gas, purchased something on the installment plan and raised an adolescent” (Marcelene Cox). You don’t know your true character until you have run out of gas, purchased something on the installment plan and raised an adolescent.

Replace the masculine pronoun with an article: “Can’t a critic give his opinion of an omelette without being asked to lay an egg?” (Clayton Rawson). Can’t a critic give an opinion about an omelette without being asked to lay an egg?

Replace the pronoun with words like someone, anyone, one, the one, no one: “He who cries, ‘What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,’ does not know even that” (Cynthia Ozick). The one who cries, ‘What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,’ does not know even that. “He who can take advice is sometimes superior to him who can give it” (Karl von Knebel). One who can take advice is sometimes superior to one who can give it.

Use genderless nouns (the average person, workers) or substitute job titles or other descriptions for the pronoun.

Replace the pronoun with a noun (or a synonym for a noun used earlier): “He is forced to be literate about the illiterate, witty about the witless and coherent about the incoherent” (John Crosby). The critic is forced to be literate about the illiterate, witty about the witless and coherent about the incoherent. “To find a friend one must close one eye—to keep him, two” (Norman Douglas). To find a friend one must close one eye—to keep a friend, two.

Singular they (“to each their own”) is now acceptable grammar (see dictionary entry “singular ‘they’”). “Nobody is a good judge in his own cause” (St. Therese of Lisieux). Nobody is a good judge in their own cause. “Only a mediocre person is always at his best” (Somerset Maugham). Only a mediocre person is always at their best. In addition, they is increasingly used to refer to nonbinary people, so using the singular they has the advantage of not only being inclusive of men and women, but being inclusive of people of all genders.

Recast in the passive voice: “Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both” (Oscar Wilde). Pessimist: One who, when given the choice of two evils, chooses both. (Objections to the passive voice are generally valid, which is why this solution is farther down the list; at the same time, it is sometimes a good choice.)

When referring to animals and nonhuman objects, avoid arbitrarily assigning them a sex. If the sex of an animal is known (and this information is important to your material), specify it. When the sex is unknown or unimportant, use it. Instead of “When you see a snake, never mind where he came from,” W. G. Benham could have said: When you see a snake, never mind where it came from. Many writers automatically use it: “There is nothing in nature quite so joyful as the very young and silly lamb—odd that it should develop into that dull and sober animal the sheep” (Esther Meynell). Also use it instead of she to refer to entities such as nature, nations, churches, ships, boats, and cars, and it instead of he to refer to the enemy, the devil, death, time.

Pseudogeneric “man/men/mankind”

Some people will try to tell you that man is defined not only as “an adult male human being” but also as “a human being,” “a person,” “an individual,” or “the whole human race.” They claim that the use of man does not exclude women but is merely a grammatical convention.

Two problems arise with this thinking: (1) We are never sure which meaning is intended, so man is ambiguous. A columnist expressed his annoyance with “the feminist campaign to eliminate the word ‘man’ from a lot of common, historic terms.” He said women should “accept the fact” that the Founding Fathers meant to include women when they wrote “all men are created equal.” He apparently forgot that it took two constitutional amendments to give women and people of color the vote, since the men created equal were exclusively and legally white, male men. Susan B. Anthony found herself in the equivocal position of not being “man” enough to vote (per the Constitution) but “man” enough (per the tax and criminal codes) to be prosecuted for trying to vote and then for refusing to pay taxes when she couldn’t. (2) Even when used as if intended to be a generic, man has often revealed its persistent ambiguity for both writers and readers.

Researchers who studied the hypothesis that man is generally understood to include women found “rather convincing evidence that when you use man generically, people do tend to think male, and tend not to think female” (Joseph Schneider and Sally Hacker, cited in Casey Miller and Kate Swift’s Words and Women). According to Miller and Swift, that study and others “clearly indicate that man in the sense of male so overshadows man in the sense of human being as to make the latter use inaccurate and misleading for purposes both of conceptualizing and communicating.”

Few wordsmiths will tolerate an ambiguous word, especially if there is an unambiguous one available. Imagine discussing giraffes and zebras, where sometimes zebras is used to include both giraffes and zebras but sometimes it means simply zebras. The audience would never know when it heard zebras whether it meant only zebras or whether it meant zebras and giraffes.

How people hear a word is far more important than its etymology or dictionary definition. Jeanette Silveira (in Cheris Kramarae, ed., The Voices and Words of Women and Men) says “[T]here is ample research evidence that the masculine ‘generic’ does not really function as a generic. In various studies words like he and man in generic contexts were presented to people who were asked to indicate their understanding by drawing, bringing in, or pointing out a picture, by describing or writing a story about the person(s) referred to, or by answering yes or no when asked whether a sex-specific word or picture applied to the meaning.” In all these studies, women/girls were perceived as being included significantly less often than men/boys. Both women and men reported that they usually pictured men when they read or heard the masculine pseudogeneric. Ask kindergarten children to draw pictures of firemen, policemen, and mailmen, and what do you think you’ll get?

The justification for man becoming the set and woman the subset is linguistically, sociologically, philosophically, and psychologically indefensible. The term human beings clearly includes both men and women. With such a simple, commonsensical alternative available, it seems unnecessary to defend a convention that is almost surely on its last legs.

We are so used to -man compounds that we feel helpless without them. Worse yet, their replacements somehow don’t “sound right.” However, -man nouns are outnumbered by the common and useful -er and -or words. Fisher seems alien to people yet has a far stronger precedent in the language than fisherman. The same is true of waiter for waitress, flagger for flagman, deliverer for deliveryman, and repairer for repairman. If we had grown up hearing shoeman, would we balk at shoemaker? What about roofman for roofer, gardenman for gardener, and teachman for teacher? The following sample list may help those alternatives for -man words sound a little more “right” to us (and are useful alternatives for some -man words):

angler, barber, batter, bottler, builder, butcher, buyer, canoer, caregiver, caretaker, carpenter, catcher, commissioner, consumer, customer, dealer, doer, dressmaker, driver, employer, executioner, farmer, fitter, gambler, gamester, gardener, golfer, hairdresser, handler, healer, hunter, insurer, jogger, jokester, laborer, landscaper, leader, lexicographer, lithographer, lover, maker, manager, manufacturer, member, messenger, nurturer, officer, outfielder, owner, painter, performer, pitcher, planner, player, plumber, practitioner, producer, promoter, provider, reporter, retailer, retainer, rider, robber, roofer, runner, shoemaker, speaker, speechmaker, storekeeper, striker, subscriber, teacher, trader, treasurer, trucker, waiter, whaler, woodworker, worker, writer; actor, administrator, ambassador, ancestor, arbitrator, auditor, author, benefactor, coadjutor, conqueror, contractor, counselor, director, doctor, editor, executor, facilitator, governor, inspector, instructor, janitor, legislator, liquidator, major, mayor, mediator, navigator, negotiator, operator, professor, proprietor, protector, purveyor, sculptor, surveyor, testator, traitor, vendor, victor.

Parallel treatment

Parallel treatment of terms is essential when discussing different groups; white and nonwhite are not parallel; neither are Jewish persons and Protestants. The problems with nonparallel treatment are most easily seen in gender asymmetries.

If you refer to a woman as Margaret Schlegel, refer to a man in the same material as Gavan Huntley. If he is Huntley, she will be Schlegel; if she is Margaret, he will be Gavan; and if she is Ms. Schlegel, he will be Mr. Huntley.

Do not make of one sex a parenthetical expression: “hats off to the postal employees who manned (and womanned) the Olympic stamp cancellation booths”; “each nurse had her (or his) own explanation.”

Male-female word pairs are especially troublesome. (1) Certain words are used as parallel pairs, but are in fact asymmetrical; for example, cameragirl/cameraman, man Friday/girl Friday, mermaid/merman, makeup girl/makeup man. The most common offender in this category is man/wife; the correct pairs are man/woman and wife/husband. (2) Other words are so unequivalent that few people confuse them as pairs, but it is revealing to study them, knowing that they were once equals: governor/governess, patron/matron, courtier/courtesan, master/mistress, buddy/sissy, hubby/hussy, dog/bitch, patrimony/matrimony, call boy/call girl, showman/showgirl. Today, a call boy is a page; a call girl is a prostitute. Buddy is affectionate; sissy is derogatory. A study of word pairs shows that words associated primarily with women ultimately become discounted and devalued. Muriel Schulz calls it “semantic derogation.” (3) Acceptable words and constructions sometimes become unacceptable because of the nonparallel way they are used. For example, a male and three women, aldermen and women, and two girls [referring to women] and a man should read: a man and three women, aldermen and alderwomen, and two women and a man.

Gender role words

Sex-linked words like feminine/masculine, manly/womanly, boyish/girlish, husbandly/wifely, fatherly/motherly, unfeminine/unmasculine, and unmanly/unwomanly depend for their meanings on cultural stereotypes and thus may be grossly inaccurate when applied to individuals. Somewhere, sometime, men and women have said, thought, or done everything the other sex has said, thought, or done except for a very few sex-linked biological activities (for example, only women can give birth or nurse a baby and only a man can provide the sperm needed to fertilize an egg). To describe a woman as unwomanly is a contradiction in terms; if a woman is doing it, saying it, wearing it, thinking it, it must be—by definition—womanly.

Good writers have rarely used such terms—they evoke no sharp images, only fuzzy impressions that vary from culture to culture and from individual to individual. This is not a recommendation to “ban” the terms; nobody can ban words. But you might look further afield for a more precise, fresh way of conveying your meaning. Steven Pinker (The Language Instinct) says, “Vehicles for expressing thought are being created far more quickly than they are being lost.” The aim of Unspinning the Spin is to inspire you to lose a few vehicles and create some new ones.

“Feminine” word endings

Suffixes like -ess, -ette, and -trix (1) specify a person’s sex when gender is irrelevant; (2) carry a demeaning sense of littleness or triviality; (3) perpetuate the notion that the male is the norm and the female is a subset, a deviation, a secondary classification. A poet is defined as “one who writes poetry” while a poetess is defined as “a female poet”; men are thus “the real thing” and women are sort of like them. Marlis Hellinger (in Cheris Kramarae et al., Language and Power) says these suffixes have “a weakening, trivializing or even sexualizing effect on an occupational activity which for a man may connote power and prestige.” Even the nonhuman varieties of “feminine” word endings connote a sense of being smaller than and inferior to their “mates”: kitchenette, luncheonette, operetta.

The purpose of a suffix is to qualify the root word. Where is the need to qualify a standard word describing a standard human activity? A poet should be a poet—without qualification. The discounting and devaluation of the female term in a word pair is the best argument against “feminine” endings; invariably the parallelism, if it ever existed, breaks down, and the female word ends up with little of the prestige and acceptability of the male word.

Alleen Pace Nilsen (Sexism and Language) says, “[T]he feminine form is used as much to indicate triviality as to indicate sex.” A woman conducting high-altitude tests for NASA was referred to as an aviator; a few days later, the same newspaper called a woman participating in a small-time air show an aviatrix. Harriet Tubman was a conductor, not a conductress, on the underground railway.

The recommended procedure is to use the base word (thus, waiter instead of waitress, executor instead of executrix). If the individual’s sex is critical to your material, use adjectives (“At a time when male actors played female roles …”) or pronouns (“The poet interrupted her reading …”).

The following words with “feminine” endings have all been or currently are part of 21st-century U.S. English. Not included are terms formed to ridicule (Rush Limbaugh derides those women who succeed in traditionally male-dominated professions as “professorettes” and “lawyerettes”). In general, replace the “feminine” ending as shown.

The weak, awkward, and annoying suffix -person is not generally recommended. It was useful in making the transition to inclusive language because it was so easy to tack -person onto words, but it not only looks contrived, it is contrived. Because the -person suffix comes so readily to mind, we tend not to look any further and thus overlook more dynamic and descriptive words.

Words that end in -woman and -man are generally listed in this guidebook as a last resort, for three reasons: (1) in most cases, it is unnecessary to specify sex; (2) male-female word pairs rarely get equal treatment and thus are better avoided; and (3) the alternatives are almost always a better linguistic choice. Mail carrier and mail handler, for example, are more descriptive than mailman and mailwoman.

Sometimes the -man and -woman words are preferable in order to emphasize the presence or participation of both sexes in some activity or position: “Local businesswomen and businessmen donated their weekends to do plumbing, electrical, and carpentry work in the new downtown shelter for homeless families.”

When using these suffixes, however, be aware of sex symmetry. Salesmen and women should be salesmen and saleswomen; layman and layperson should be layman and laywoman.

actress/actor

adulteress/adulterer

ambassadress/ambassador

ancestress/ancestor

authoress/author

aviatrix, aviatress/aviator

benefactress/benefactor

coadjutress/coadjutor

comedienne/comedian

conductress/conductor

deaconess/deacon

drum majorette/drum major

electress/elector

enchantress/enchanter

equestrienne/equestrian

executrix/executor

giantess/giant

goddess/god

governess/governor

heiress/heir

heroine/hero

hostess/host

huntress/hunter

Jewess/Jew

laundress/launderer

majorette/major

mayoress/mayor

mediatrix/mediator

millionairess/millionaire

Negress/African American, black

ogress/ogre

peeress/peer

procuress/procurer

prophetess/prophet

proprietress/proprietor

priestess/priest

sculptress/sculptor

seamstress/sewer

seductress/seducer

shepherdess/shepherd

songstress/singer

sorceress/sorcerer

starlet/star

stewardess/steward

suffragette/suffragist

temptress/tempter

tragedienne/tragedian

traitress/traitor

usherette/usher

villainess/villain

waitress/waiter

-Woman, -Man, -Person

Word order

Because the male has been considered more important than the female, the male word has traditionally been placed first. However, this gives the impression that women are not only less important but afterthoughts as well. As any five-year-old knows, we should take turns going first. The following list of word pairs is given in their “natural” order (which you are invited to switch half the time): men and women, boys and girls, male and female, he and she, his and hers, sons and daughters, husbands and wives, brother and sister, Mr. and Mrs., kings and queens. Alleen Pace Nilsen (Sexism and Language) says we break the pattern only in words relating to the traditional women’s domain of family and marriage: bride and groom, mother and father, aunt and uncle, widow and widower. We also do it in the polite but empty convention of ladies and gentlemen.

The general rule here is to vary the order.

Naming

Power belongs to those who do the naming, which is why naming is one of the most critical issues for fairness and accuracy in language. We know more about our own lives than others do; we must also assume that other people know more about their lives than we do. As Native American activist Bill Pensoneau wrote, “If we say that ‘Redskins’ reminds us of massacres, believe us.”

Self-definition

“One of the most basic ways of showing respect for others is to refer to them by the names with which they have chosen to identify themselves and to avoid using names that they consider offensive” (American Heritage Book of English Usage). The correct names for individuals and groups are always those they have chosen for themselves. “It isn’t strange that those persons who insist on defining themselves, who insist on this elemental privilege of self-naming, self-definition, and self-identity encounter vigorous resistance. Predictably, the resistance usually comes from the oppressor or would-be oppressor and is a result of the fact that he or she does not want to relinquish the power which comes from the ability to define others” (Haig Bosmajian, The Language of Oppression).

Ian Hancock, linguist and president of the International Roma Federation, uses the term exonym for a name applied to a group by outsiders. For example, Romani peoples object to being called by the exonym Gypsies; they do not call themselves Gypsies. Among the many other exonyms are: the elderly, colored people, homosexuals, pagans, adolescents, Eskimos, pygmies, savages. The test for an exonym is whether people want others to refer to them with that term—redmen, illegal aliens, holy rollers—or whether only outsiders describe them that way.

As a general rule, call people what they want to be called, and don’t call them what they object to being called.

“People first” language

Labels are disabling; intuitively most of us recognize this and resist being labeled. The disability movement originated the “people first” guidance, which says we don’t call someone a “diabetic” but rather “a person with diabetes.” Saying someone is “an HIV/AIDS victim” reduces the person to a disease, a label, a statistic; use instead “a person with/who has/living with HIV/AIDS.” The 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act is a good example of thoughtful wording. Name the person as a person first, and let qualifiers (age, sex, disability, race) follow, but (and this is crucial) only if they are relevant. Readers of a magazine aimed at an older audience were asked what they wanted to be called (elderly? Senior citizens? Seniors? Golden-agers?). They rejected all the terms; one said, “How about just people?” When high school students rejected labels like kids, teens, teenagers, youth, adolescents, and juveniles, and were asked in exasperation just what they would like to be called, they said, “Could we just be people?” Name the person as a person first, and let qualifiers (age, sex, disability, ethnicity) follow, but (and this is crucial) only if they are relevant. Not all those with disabilities like people-first language; some members of the autism and Deaf communities, for example, prefer identity-first language. When possible, ask the person with the disability for an accurate descriptor.

Women as separate people

One of the most sexist maneuvers in the language has been the identification of women by their connections to husband, son, or father—often even after he is dead. Women are commonly identified as someone’s widow while men are rarely referred to as anyone’s widower. If a connection is relevant, make it mutual. Instead of “Frieda, his wife of 17 years,” write “Frieda and Eric, married for 17 years.”

Marie Marvingt, a Frenchwoman who lived around the turn of the 20th century, was an inventor, adventurer, stuntwoman, super athlete, aviator, and all-around scholar. She chose to be affianced to neither man (as wife) nor God (as religious), but it was not long before an uneasy male press found her a fit partner. She is still known today by the revealing label “the Fiancée of Danger.”

For some people it is difficult to watch women doing unconventional things with their names, especially when they flout the rules that connect them with men in a “readable” way. For years, the etiquette books were able to tell us precisely how to address a single woman, a married woman, a divorced woman, or a widowed woman (there was no similar etiquette for men because we have never had a code to signal their marital status). But now some women are Ms. and some are Mrs., some are married but keeping their birth names, others are hyphenating their last name with their husband’s, and still others have constructed new names for themselves. Some women—including African American women who were denied this right earlier in our history—take great pride in using their husband’s name. All these forms are correct. The rule of self-definition applies here: call the woman what she wants to be called.

Name-calling

It’s unlikely that people come to this guide for help in choosing the most accurate and precise epithets when they need them. However, some are included because not everybody considers them slurs or because alternatives are often needed. See, for example, animal names for people, ethnic slurs, and food names for people, as well as individual entries (bastard, bitch).

Special problems

Hidden bias

Writing may be completely free of biased terms yet still carry a biased message. According to a radio news item, “More women than ever before are living with men without being married to them. And more unmarried women than ever before are having babies.” An accurate, unbiased report would have said: “More men and women than ever before are living together without being married. And more single women than ever before are having babies.”

Too often, language is used to make assumptions about people—that everyone is male, heterosexual, without a disability, white, married, between the ages of 26 and 54, of western European extraction. Until it becomes second nature to write without bias, reread your material as if you were: a gay man, someone who uses a wheelchair, a Japanese American woman, someone over 80 or under 16, or other “individuals” of your own creation. If you do not feel left out, discounted, and ignored, but instead can read without being stopped by some incongruence, you have probably avoided hidden bias. It is also wonderfully helpful to ask someone from a group with which you aren’t familiar to read your work; they can quickly spot any irregularities.

Passive constructions

Most writing style books recommend the active over the passive voice; this is also an important concept in the language of bias. There are important differences between “she was beaten” and “he beat her,” between “the first Black woman who was admitted to the university” and “the first Black woman who entered the university.” The active voice is too often reserved for those in power while everyone else is acted upon.

Perspective

Our perceptions color our language, for example, “I am firm. You are obstinate. He is a pig-headed fool” (Katharine Whitehorn). In the same way, men are “cautious” but women are “timid”; some people are “shiftless,” while others are “unemployed”; if the Indians won, it was a “massacre”; if the Cavalry won, it was a “victory.” In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a photograph showed a Black man and a white man. The caption explained that the Black man was looting; the white man was looking for groceries. “A man has to be Joe McCarthy to be called ruthless. All a woman has to do is put you on hold” (Marlo Thomas). It is helpful to mentally substitute other groups for the ones you are describing and see if your adjectives are still as precise and accurate.

Fellow, king, lord, master

Fellow, king, lord, and master have three things in common: (1) Either from definition, derivation, or people’s perceptions of them, they are biased. All four are male-oriented: king, lord, and master are also hierarchical, dominator-society terms; master evokes the horrors of slavery. (2) They are root words: many other words, phrases, and expressions are formed from them, thus extending their reach. (3) Not everyone agrees whether all forms of them are biased. Someone who might admit that a fellow sitting next to them at lunch can only be a man might see nothing unacceptable in the expression fellow student. Those who agree that the master of a certain house is a man might believe that mastering a skill is fair language. But consider, for example, the cumulative effect on the language when such a masculine and slavery-related word as master is encountered in so many everyday ways: master bedroom, master builder, master class, masterful, master hand, master key, master list, mastermind, masterpiece, master plan, master stroke, master switch, master tape, master teacher, masterwork, mastery, overmaster, past master, postmaster, prizemaster, self-mastery.

Those who prefer to use these four words only in their narrowest, male-defined meanings will find alternatives in the main text for all other uses.

How to make a fortune with fair and accurate language

Actually, there’s not a lot of money in this business, and this section just contains some basic understandings about language, which people usually won’t read. But stay; it’s kind of interesting.

Who controls the language?

The correct answer is always: “You do.” Language doesn’t belong to grammarians, linguists, wordsmiths, writers, or editors. It belongs to the people who use it. It goes where people want it to go, and, like a balky mule, you can’t make it go where it doesn’t want to go.

Constructions that were once labeled incorrect are now in dictionaries because people persisted in using them. Constructions that were mandated by law (the use of he to mean he and she by an 1850 Act of Parliament, for example) were ignored by many speakers and writers of English because people wanted to say what they wanted to say. Those who understand language know there’s only one reason for it to change: because a critical mass of people want it to.

An often-expressed fear of keep-it-the-way-it-is fans is that they will be forced to use language they don’t want to use. And, in fact, many publishing houses, businesses, government offices, churches, mosques, synagogues, universities, and national organizations have policies on the use of respectful language. Are rights being abridged here? Freedoms taken away? Probably not. Absolute freedom doesn’t exist and never did. Just as we don’t spit on the floor at work, swear at customers, or send out letters full of misspellings, so too we might have to “watch our language.” It is odd that the request for unbiased language in schools and workplaces is considered intolerable when other limits on our freedom to do whatever we want are not.

The rigid orthodoxy, the narrowest view of language, belongs not to those who offer 15 ways of dealing with the personal pronoun but to those who insist that the pseudogeneric he is right in all cases and tell us to quit “tinkering” with the language.

Tinker away. It’s yours.

Does it really matter?

One objection to insisting on unbiased language is that it is really too trivial an issue when there are so many more important ones that need our attention.

First, it is to be hoped that there are enough of us working on issues large and small that the work will all get done someday. Second, the connections between the way we think, speak, and act are by now beyond argument. Language goes hand-in-hand with social change—both shaping it and reflecting it. Sexual harassment was not a term anyone used until the 1970s; today, we have laws against it. How could we have the law without the language? In fact, the judicial system is a good argument for the importance of “mere words”; the legal profession devotes great energy to the precise interpretation of words—often with far-reaching and significant consequences.

Words matter terribly. The difference between fetal tissue and unborn baby (referring to the very same thing) is arguably the most debated issue in the country. The United States changed The War Department to The Department of Defense because words matter. When President Bush used the word hostages for the first time in August 1990, it made headlines; up to that time, he had been using detainees. The change of terms signaled a change in our posture toward Iraq.

It is ironic that some of the strongest insistence that this issue is “silly” comes from political conservatives. In 1990, a pamphlet titled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control” was sent to Republican candidates running in state elections by GOPAC, a conservative group headed by House Republican whip Newt Gingrich. One of the key points in it was that “language matters.” The pamphlet offered a list of words and phrases “to use in writing literature and letters, in preparing speeches, and in producing material for the electronic media. Use the list[s] to help define your campaign and your vision of public service.” Two basic lists were given, one set of words to use for one’s own campaign (for example, common sense, courage, crusade, dream, duty, peace, pioneer, precious, pride, fair, family, hard work, liberty, moral, pro-environment, prosperity, reform, rights, strength, truth, vision) and another set to use for one’s opponent’s campaign (for example, anti-child, anti-flag, betray, cheat, corruption, crisis, decay, devour, disgrace, excuses, failure, greed, hypocrisy, incompetent, liberal, lie, obsolete, pathetic, radical, red tape, self-serving, shallow, shame, sick, taxes, traitors).

In the end, then, it appears that our choice of words is not too trivial—not for presidents, for conservatives, for any of us.

They’ve got to stop changing the language!

Having come of age using handicapped, black-and-white, chairman, leper, mankind, and the pseudogeneric he, some people are bewildered and upset by discussions about such terms’ correctness.

And yet if there’s one thing consistent about language it is that it is constantly changing. The only languages that do not change are those whose speakers are dead. Dictionary maven Ken Kister estimates that some 25,000 new words enter the language each year. So it isn’t language change alone that frightens and annoys some people, but specifically language change that deals with people.

Anne H. Soukhanov, executive editor of the most excellent and useful American Heritage Dictionary, says in Word Watch, “In bringing together into one lexicon diverse linguistic elements from diverse peoples, nations, and cultures, the English language—the prime exponent, in fact, of multiculturalism—has been much more accepting of and tolerant to change and new ideas than some of its own speakers and writers have been.”

In any case, the “changes” in language used to describe people are not so much changes as choices. For example, firefighter has been in the language since 1903; using it instead of fireman isn’t so much a change in the language as a choice to use what some think is a better word. We make these kinds of choices all the time; we call it good writing. Inuits and Roms and the San never did call themselves Eskimos, Gypsies, and Bushmen; the fact that we have finally grasped the terminology is not as much a change as it is a correction or a choice to use the correct words. Chair (meaning the person in charge of the meeting) came into the language before chairman; people mistakenly think chair is a new and strange usage. Actually it’s been there all the time.

What ridiculous word will we have next?

The most common tactic in trying to unhorse fair and accurate language—probably because it is assumed to be entertaining—is ridicule. Dozens of syndicated columnists and letter-to-the-editor writers posit some hypothetical endpoint of unbiased language, skillfully show how absurd it is, and retire from the field, victorious. In one case, the writer showed how silly the word “woperson” (for “woman”) is. Quite right, too. In another case, “ottoperson” was given as the height of linguistic absurdity. No argument there. In a magazine letters column, a reader complained about the problems we were going to have with pronouns as parts of words: “‘Herman was a hermit who had a hernia when climbing the Himalayas’ translates to ‘Itit was an itmit who had an itnia climbing the Himalayas.’” The magazine editor added: “Italayas?” We’ve also had great fun with—among dozens of others—“follicularly challenged” (bald), “cerebrally challenged” (stupid), “ethically challenged” (criminal), “personipulate,” “personperson” (for mailman—William Safire’s contribution), “personhole cover,” and “chairperdaughter” (for chairperson).

The problem with ridicule is that nobody is asking for such silly language. Those who are serious about writing that is as graceful as it is inclusive can choose from among thousands of standard terms. There is no need to use awkward, contrived, or bizarre terms (unless you want to, of course). Anyone who says we must choose between elegant, standard language and respectful language is stuck in a binary thinking warp. In some of today’s best literature you can find poetic, grammatical writing that is free of stereotypes and demeaning language.

This is not to deny that striving for fair and accurate language is occasionally awkward; cutting edges are always a little rough, and we’re all still getting used to this. But then there is a great deal of bad writing in this country, and only a small fraction of it can be laid at the door of those who use unbiased language. The myth here is that either you write beautifully or you write respectfully. You can do both. It’s work, but so is any other good writing.

But will it be better writing?

One of the rewards of breaking away from traditional, biased language—and for many people, the most unexpected benefit—is a dramatic improvement in writing style. By replacing fuzzy, over-generalized, cliché-ridden words with explicit, active words and by giving concrete examples and anecdotes instead of one-word-fits-all descriptions you can express yourself more dynamically, convincingly, and memorably.

“If those who have studied the art of writing are in accord on any one point, it is on this: the surest way to arouse and hold the attention of the reader is by being specific, definite, and concrete” (William Strunk and E.B. White, The Elements of Style).

Writers who talk about brotherhood or spinsters or right-hand man miss a chance to spark their writing with fresh descriptions; unthinking writing is also less informative. Instead of the unrevealing adman there are precise, descriptive, inclusive words like advertising executive, copywriter, account executive, ad writer, or media buyer.

The word manmade, which seems so indispensable to us, doesn’t actually say very much. Does it mean artificial? Handmade? Synthetic? Fabricated? Machine-made? Custom-made? Simulated? Plastic? Imitation? Contrived?

Communication is—or ought to be—a two-way street. A speaker or writer who uses man to mean human being while the audience or reader understands it as adult male is an example of communication gone awry. “Meaning is not something that belongs solely to the utterance that is spoken or the piece of writing. Meaning also depends on the person who hears the utterance or reads the text” (Ronald Macaulay, The Social Art: Language and Its Uses).

Unbiased language is logical, accurate, and realistic. Biased language is not. How logical is it to speak of the “discovery” of America, a land already inhabited by millions of people? Where is the realism in the full-page automobile advertisement that says in bold letters, “A good driver is a product of his environment,” when more women than men influence car-buying decisions? And when we use stereotypes to talk about people (“Isn’t that just like a welfare mother/Indian/girl/old man?”), our speech and writing will be inaccurate and unrealistic most of the time.

Your help wanted

Language about people is constantly changing, more especially perhaps in this period than in any other in U.S. history. If you disagree with something here, if you find biased terms not listed, or if you know of additional alternatives for biased terms, please send your comments to unspinning@womensmediacenter.com.