Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language
by Amanda Montell
There is a hoary old chestnut that you’ve got to understand the rules before you can break them. Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language knows this, and revels in it. The writing is ultracasual, colloquial, conversational. Its subject matter is linguistic didacticism, phonetic gestalts, Sapir-Whorf boundaries. The writing takes deep and engaging subject matter and makes it approachable. Most importantly, it is fun to read.
Take the line, “But they haven’t been able to find much. And by “much,” I mean anything at all.” I really enjoy this type of superfluousness. It is what I excise from my own writing in an effort to be more concise. Perhaps I shouldn’t, because it serves a function: it draws more attention to the copious amounts of “nothing” that was found. Moreover, perhaps I shouldn’t because functional utility is not the only goal of writing. It isn’t even, like, a good goal of writing. Being engaging and fun is a much better goal. No matter how much information a book contains, you’ll get exactly none of it if it is too boring to read.
What’s that? You’d liked to know what “they” hadn’t been able to “find much of?” Let us circle back to that later.
I both owned this and framed this.
Back to utility: posters taped to the wall convey all the information inherent to the poster. You don’t really need a nice frame. In fact, frames add non-essential visual stimuli that may detract from the coolness of a Radiohead featuring Beck 2001 Amnesiac Tour poster. You certainly don’t need the frame. But it adds a certain panache. It lends a sense of import to certain artifacts of your past. Representational identity, thy name is merch.
See, what I’m trying to say is that conversational writing adds a flourish. It adds context. The frame tells its own, parallel, story; perhaps that slapping up your posters to the wall with some Scotch tape means, “Hey dude, I’m not staying in this dorm all that long.” Or, “I don’t even know how much I even like Radiohead/Beck.” Or, “This poster was a gift from someone I may or may not continue to date.” Implicit ephemerality. Malleable adolescent tastes. There is a lot to be learned from a poster on the wall.
Ditto a frame. It might convey a certain affluence, or the desire to appear as such. Over-the-top gilt? Yikes, man, you’re desperate to appear wealthy to those that don’t know a gold-plated penthouse is gauche, not grand. Non-essential visual expressions or extraneous verbiage create the interstices between simple transfers of fact where creative life happens.
This is the type of depth that the writing in Wordslut inspires.
The bright lights and big city conjured up by the text does create its fair share of shadows, however: the subtitle is bad—aggressive and misleading like so many other pop non-fiction books before it. Worse, how in the world did this book get away with not having an index, end notes, non-editorial footnotes, a bibliography, or a citations page? For example:
Linguists have found that hypercorrection is most common among lower-middle-class women, who see the adverb well, for instance, as a marker of higher social class...acquiring more prestigious language skills is a powerful tool for women of less socioeconomic privilege. To manifest their aspirations of upward mobility, they attempt to adopt the higher-class grammatical form, but they overshoot the target. The misused wells and whoms were intended to hoist the speaker up the socioeconomic ladder—to gain her respect. It just doesn’t always work out that way.
This is a super-interesting quote. It analogizes well with my “picture frame” theory above; perhaps the gaudier frames exist solely to showcase wealth, misapplied as a marker of upper crust tastes. But beyond supporting my essay structure, is it really that informative? There is simply no way to know which linguists drew this conclusion, nor how. I don’t believe for a moment that this was an issue with the author’s understanding or research: when specific studies are referenced, primary authorship and publication date are worked into the text itself. There is often enough to track down the Hollaback! study or the find Women's Sex talk and Men's Sex Talk: Different Worlds, but “Linguists say... (pg 136),” “Linguists have found... (pg 91), “Linguistic studies show…” (pg 55), and the entirety of a “1990s study by Jenny Cook-Gumperz” remain mysteries all. I cannot conceive of what publishing or marketing niche this impressively academic text is being squeezed to fit into to allow all standard citation work to be excised.
Breaking the rules is laudable: non-fiction needs not be dusty or dry, and Wordslut is nothing if not engaging. I’m not a grammatical prescriptivist nor a literary pedant, but some standards exist for practical and useful reasons. At the very least, including end notes for reference material when the work is so heavily reliant on citation should be a no-brainer. Just think of how many cool things people could find! Broad City, This American Life, Reply All, a reference to Dyirbal, the language that gave Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things its eye-catching title. (After personally spending a month and a half struggling through Women, Fire, seeing “Dyirbal” again sent me into a physical panic much like the jolt I felt the first morning after the Bar Exam was over, when I felt like I must have slept through my “wake-up-and-go-study” alarm.)
I liked Wordslut. A lot. If you read my review of Three Women, which I was writing while I read this, you’ll see that I internalized large chunks of this text. I have no qualms recommending it to anyone that likes reading. It is smart as hell. And almost all of the metatextual information I desperately want to find—indices, footnotes, end notes, bibliography—is simply presented textually, instead. It makes for smooth reading, but terrible citation. Perhaps this was a stylistic choice: Wordslut is meant to be read, not referenced. A conversation, not a lecture.
That’s it, I guess. Book review over.
Ah, yes, you’re waiting to find out what the the “And by “much,” I mean anything at all” excerpt from above was all about. Well, ignore the unsupported “a few linguists who...” in the following section: “There have been a few linguists over the years who’ve tried to identify a lesbian voice equivalent to the gay male one.” Probably weren’t expecting that, were you? And if this is the type of question you’re interested in hearing about, go pick up Wordslut to find out why it isn’t a fair question in the first place.