Critical Quarterlies
‘Dick-tionaries’
For women... the ultimate outcome is the same: whether descriptive or prescriptive, authoritarian or democratic, massive or minimal, systematic or quixotic... dictionaries have systematically excluded any notion of women as speakers, as linguistic innovators, or as definers of words. Women in their pages have been rendered invisible, reduced to stereotypes, ridiculed, trivialized or demeaned. Whatever their intentions, then, dictionaries have functioned as linguistic legislators which perpetrate the stereotypes and prejudices of their writers and editors, who are almost exclusively male.
Kramerae & Treichler The Feminist Dictionary (1976)
All right! Aww riigghhtt!!! Can ya hear me? Thomas Harman in the house? Francis Grose in the house? Big up the old school. Big up John Camden Hotten. Big up Farmer and Henley. Shout out to Eric Partridge, major props to Jonathan Lighter... I wanna hear it, I wanna hear it! Put your lexica together, put your glossaries, your thesauri, your dictionaries together, check that slang from back in the day to the very latest level, and let’s hear it for the Laydeez slang stylee!!!!!
If we must. Armful. Baggage. Chick. Dolly. Eyeful. Fish. Grubber. Hole. Icebox. Juicer. Kugel. Lollipop. Milf. Nutcracker. Oyster. Placket. Quim. Rantipole. Skank. Tottie. Unfortunate. Velvet. Wool. Yatty. Zipper. (There is no X – let us assume Xantippe, Grose did - ‘a scolding wife’ - but only he).
There are four thousand slang terms meaning woman, and that’s excluding such specificities as female members of the family (including a man’s wife [218] and mother-in-law) and a variety of occupations, most well-apostrophized being those of prostitute (over 1200) and brothel keeper. There are 1300 more for her genitals, 350 for her breasts (plus 28 nippples), just under 250 for her legs. There are none for her brain, but be fair, there are none for the male equivalent, other than in its metaphorical absence from the fool’s top storey– this is slang, after all. There are various subsets in which she features as an object of desire and (through mankind’s lusting eyes) assumed availability. These, one might suggest, are not considering her as a woman, at least by feminist standards. The term lady is of course far from slang, although the modern use, beloved of radio jocks and hip-hop MCs, seems to echo the more glutinous aspects of hippiedom – ‘Hey man, I’m Good Vibes and this is my lady, Starshine’ – with a little of Lenny Henry’s Theophilus P. Wildebeest’s ‘big lurve’ intonations thrown in. She is not, as set down in the OED’s first definition, ‘a mistress in relation to servants or slaves; the female head of a household’, other than in the antebellum South’s Misses Amy, Ann or Mary.
The slang dictionary is the last great repository of a linguistic world in which the only role for the phrase ‘politically correct’ (and more recently ‘woke’) might be as some little-used but inevitably obscene piece of rhyming slang. (That neither has yet been co-opted does not ensure that they never will be.) The problem within its pages, as I have noted before, is not which words to label ‘derogatory’, but which can be freed from such a description. Slang is rough and tough and eschews every convention, that of Geneva included. It does not do caring, sharing and compassion. It barely, other than in the phrases of male yearning, does compliments. (And for the female object of such desires, is there really much difference between being the subject of the supposedly congratulatory ‘I’d eat my chips out of her knickers’ and the dismissive ‘I wouldn’t touch her with yours’?). Meanwhile, in simple nationalism and/or religiosity, the Frogs get it, as do the Krauts, the Ikey-mos, the Towelheads, the Pakis and of course the Niggers.1 The male homosexual, a charter woman by slang characterization, is almost as despised as his ‘real’ equivalent. (If the trans-sexual is still under-represented , time will doubtless amend that omission). But the stats have it: slang hates women most.
That slang, language’s chav, garlanded with the linguistic equivalent of hoodie, bling and must-have ASBO, should maintain such postures is hardly surprising. The slang dictionaries, the street-corner on which ‘low’ speech lounges, showing to off the passing mainstream lexica, who in their quest for ‘credibility’ or ‘access’ seem all too keen to adopt some of its less frightening terminology, have no choice but to offer an arena for slang’s lexicon, ever-expanding, but generally playing out the same old tunes: sex, drugs, money, insults and the rest. Other dictionaries may seem to attend to societal progress. Even the most descriptive of the lot, the OED, now accepts the need to insert some modificatory label at, for instance, ‘nigger’ in whatever form or ‘jew’ as a verb. More prescriptive volumes tread a warier path, simply excluding the contentious terms. Slang does not. One may perhaps no longer describe the (Grose’s hyphenated coyness) ‘C—t’ as ‘a nasty word for a nasty thing; nor blithely toss in, at ‘wog’, ‘well, what else do you call them’ (Beale’s revision of Partridge 1984) or salivate over the delights of the miniskirt (Partridge c. 1965 et seq.) but the underlying rule, whether applied to glossaries of the 16th century or full-blown multi-volume works of the 21st, remains the same: it can be a dirty vocabulary, but we slang collectors have to list it.
With women as the ‘dirtiest’ words of all. If standard English and its dictionaries might be described as what the feminist writer Dale Spender termed in her eponymous book of 1982 ‘man-made language’, then slang is even more culpable of the monocular viewpoint. Of the 4000-plus words delineating woman, it is hard to find even a hundred that apprise her in a positive context, other, inevitably, than those which extol her perceived sexual availability or avidity. Only the women of the immediate family, those within the proscribed circles of the incestuous gaze, escape unscathed: mother, grandmother, daughter, niece, aunt. And even then slang offers its nudge-nudge mockeries. Aunt has meant a whore, as have niece and daughter (as daughter of the game), mother (with such apposite combinations as ‘mother damnable’ and ‘mother cunny’) a brothel keeper, and even grandmother finds herself appropriated by the long list of quasi-euphemisms for the Oedipal adjective motherfucking, in this case granny-jazzing or granny-dodging. You may, of course, teach her to suck eggs or, using another synonym for fuck, to sard.
Nothing underlines the gender disparity of slang as does its descriptions of the genitals. The numbers are approximately equal: around 1300 synonyms for both male and female versions. The vagina is the Monosyllable (or C-word); it gains euphemisms: agility, poor man’s blessing; the euphemisms can be literary: agreeable ruts of life (from Cleland’s synonym-heavy Fanny Hill); tirly-whirly (Burns); living fountain (Robert Herrick); there are jolly nicknames such as Buckinger's Boot which refers to the hapless Matthew Buckinger (1674 – 1740) who was born limbless ‘notwithstanding which’, remarks Grose, ‘he drew coats of arms very neatly and could write the Lord’s Prayer within the compass of one shilling’; thus for him a boot could only fit his ‘third leg’, i.e. his penis. But on the whole, such fear, such loathing. It is an animal, usually a cat. It is a place for the penis to attack or semen to be dumped, it lurks beneath pubic hair, it is a hole, a slit, a gutter. It is a trap, both figuratively and in dick-shrinking fantasy. It exists as a sex object, as a money-making commodity. At best, it is a place – a road, an entrance, a pathway – or some vestige of nature, typically involving water or food.
Now the penis – what a regular boy’s toy to be sure: it represents the male as genitor (hymning the glories of procreation), it is a cock (‘Pistol’s cock is up and flashing fire!’), a prick and a tool; it is a member, a weapon, a knife, a dagger, a gun, a stick, a hunter; it is food; it rejoices in pet names and nursery terms. It extends to cover erections, size, circumcision and, jeeringly, impotence. It comes team-handed, accompanied by a whole new list, for the testicles. Intercourse – seventeen hundred more synonyms – is another ripping yarn of boys’ adventure. Those guns, sticks and daggers do their job. A whole set of terms – bang, biff, bonk, bash, do, grind, knock, poke, prod, screw, nail, plank – sound like some copulatory form of DIY. Only the barbecue is lacking to make dad’s paradise, though of course there’s plenty of meat. No place for a female here: the vagina, dentata or otherwise, hasn’t a chance.
The lexicographer is the messenger, and there’s little point in shooting him for the words he delivers, and it must be noted that for the majority of its span, and even those who would always offer a choice of genders in their pronoun must accept the fact, this really is a case for ‘he’ alone. Lexicography, until recently, has been on the whole a male preserve. Today’s title-pages list such as Joan Houston Hall of DARE, Erin McKean of the New Oxford American Dictionary, Korey Stamper and Joanne Despres of Merriam Webster (all Americans, perhaps predictably). Charlotte Brewer, Linda Mugglestone and Julie Coleman are among a number of female lexicologists, and linguists, of course, are legion. But the development remains relatively modern. The first woman to appear in most histories of dictionary-making is Amy the wife of Thomas Cooper, the Oxonian author of a 16th century Latin-English dictionary. Bored perhaps by his endless ferreting among the manuscripts, she was notoriously generous with her sexual favours. So celebrated was one particular affair that her lover was bound over to avoid her company, and a contemporary satire, detailing the amours of various university worthies devoted some fifteen innuendo-laden verses to Amy Cooper’s dalliances. The hapless Cooper turned a blind eye. He was similarly forbearing when, as John Aubrey put it, his wife, ‘irreconcilably angrie with him for sitting-up late at night so, compileing his Dictionarie... threw it into the fire and burnt it. Well, for all that, the good man had so great a zeale for the advancement of learning, that he began it again.’ (One need be neither lexicographer nor aggressively masculinist to wince.) James Murray’s daughters duly earned pennies for helping their father, and the OED’s list of readers memorializes such magnificent cite-gatherers as ‘Miss Jennett Humphreys (of Cricklewood; 18,700) and ‘The Misses Edith and E. Perronet Thompson (15,000)’, and the greatest reader of the lot was Marghanita Laski (a pioneer of reading modern women’s writing for citations and sometimes including specific words in her own published writing when no other example could be unearthed) who turned over some quarter-million examples to the second edition. But the OED, like its contemporary monument of intellectual empire-building, Sir Leslie Stephen’s DNB, remained one for the boys (even if one of its greatest advocates, the pink-tied, ‘radical’ Frederick Furnivall married his housemaid and on Saturdays coached a rowing eight culled from the waitresses of his favourite ABC restaurant.)
Slang has an even more relentlessly phallocentric record. The canonical authors tell the story. From the 16th century’s Copland (a printer) and Harman (a magistrate), the 17th’s B.E. (apostrophized as ‘Gent.’ but otherwise anonymous), the 18th’s corpulent antiquarian and militia captain Francis Grose, his 19th century successors Pierce Egan, the most macho of sporting journalists, the publisher John Camden Hotten, who mixed lexicography with flagellant porn, spiritualist John Farmer, imperial poet W.E. Henley, and through to the modern Eric Partridge, Jonathan Lighter and this writer, where, pace Connie Eble, the doyenne of contemporary US campus locutions and Geneva Smitherman, author of the glossary Black Talk (1994), are the women? That said, Julie Coleman’s five-volume (to date) History of Cant and Slang Dictionaries is the unrivalled academic treatment of its field.
It is not that the all-woman dictionary has not been essayed. In 1976 Cheris Kramerae, and Paula A. Treichler published the The Feminist Dictionary, ‘a dictionary of feminist thinking and word-making; a conceptual guide to that subset of the lexicon concerned with feminism; a documentation of feminist perspectives, interpretations of words, and contributions to linguistic creativity and scholarship; and a dictionary itself made by feminists.’ As such it falls, as its editors note, into the area occupied by such quasi-‘dictionaries’ as Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas and Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary - although it lacks the irony of the one and the cynicism of the other. It is not a dictionary in which one looks up words in the expected way. For instance those who search for a definition of ‘ABILITY’ find only this: ‘ability "Is sexless" (Christabel Pankhurst Calling All Women February 2, 1957)’. Nor would the traditional dictionary offer ‘ABOMINABLE SNOWMEN OF ANDROCRATIC ACADEMIA’ Scholars dominated by male-centred traditions’. Headwords are very much drawn from an alternative lexicon; definitions are consciously oppositional to what is dismissed as the ‘male’ norm, they are also more encyclopedic, even discursive, than would usually be expected; the tone is hortatory and to the jaundiced reader somewhat martyred as regards its consideration of traditional lexicography: those who are not positively with me, runs the subtext, must be aggressively against me. By the standards that inform the majority of works as usually defined, the dictionary fails as a lexicographical work, but those standards are indisputably ‘male standards’, restricting lexicography to the world of ‘patriarchal authoritarianism’. Thus, as its editors point out, using ‘a flexible format is a conscious effort to honor the words and arguments of women, to liberate our thinking about what can be said about language and to guard against lexicographical ownership of words and definitions.’ They want quite specifically to produce something that is not the traditional ‘dick-tionary’. Whether this justifies the following paragraph is up to the dictionary’s user: ‘We are also aware of the need to pay close attention to the words of disabled women, some of whom call others TABS - "temporarily able-bodied." One question is whether we make an effort to expunge phrases from our language like "stand up for what you believe or "blind as a bat"...’ The user must also make her or his decision as to the need for justifying the use of alphabetical order (which of course puts men before women, although housework before war) as not being ‘a value judgment.’2
Cracks about ‘PC gone mad’ notwithstanding, one cannot ignore the argument. For all the recruitment of women by dictionary publishers, and the essays in feminist-specific lexicography, lexicography’s male bias remains. So much, after all, lies in recording the words and usage of the past. It may change, but maybe the ‘message’ will have to alter first and that, especially in slang, may never happen. Jane Mills, whose Womanwords (1989) is more an explanatory thesaurus of anti-female stereotyping than a dictionary as such, has suggested that, ‘Lexicographers deserve much of the criticism levelled against them. But not all of it... the basic source material of a lexicographer has been the written word, and most books have been, and still are, written and published by men. Dictionaries which chronicle usage are not necessarily prescriptive. If in the past a dictionary failed to refer to a young woman as a "girl" the lexicographer would have been failing in his job had he not used the term which the rest of society used and understood.’ That said, there has been a gradual shift in emphasis. This is particularly common in works aimed at children, where short contextual sentences are used to back up the primary definition. Comparing such sentences in two editions of the same dictionary, published respectively in 1968 and 1983 Sidney Landau offered these examples. ‘Cherish: A mother cherishes her baby’ (1968) becomes ‘Parents cherish their children’ (1983), while ‘Seize: In fright she seized his arm’ (1968) becomes ‘In fright I seized her arm’ (1983). How much this influences the young reader is debatable. Nonetheless more and more mainstream dictionaries are using their definitions to follow suit. We shall see. The larger world must conspire with the dictionary, however rigorously non-sexist, to effect that level of social revolution.3
For more information (and a greater lexis), see:
https://timelinesofslang.com/women.html [Age & Relationships]
https://timelinesofslang.com/women2.html [By Stereotypes: Attractive, Unattractive, Fat, Large, Sexy, Promiscuous, Large, Sexy, Promiscuous, Gossip + Chat, Nag, Unpleasant, Stupid, Lazy, Unkempt, Overdressed
[Taken with revisions from Critical Quarterly #16 2007]
Revising this piece in 2022, the use of ‘nigger’ jumps from the page even more shockingly than it did 15 years ago. Nonetheless, I find most slang euphemism, in this case ‘the n-word’, like the older tradition of placing judicious asterisks or spaces do more to draw attention than they ever they do to disguise or soft-pedal the objectionable terms. Slang’s role is to offer ‘what is’ and not ‘what should be’. Thus such words appear in my dictionary, along with the necessary citations that underpin and illustrate their use though like other modern dictionaries I have tried - are such nudges really necessary? - to make their position clear. Whether such ‘trigger warnings’ have the slightest effect, I cannot say.
As much as note 1, this paragraph dates the piece to an era, so near, so far, when the strictures now branded/celebrated as ‘woke’ had yet to gain mainstream consideration.
I made my own attempt to assess the role of women in slang in my book Sounds and Furies (2019). If the theory was the finding of hitherto unknown users, coiners and collectors, and caches of women-only slang, the practise proved disappointing. If women do appear in the counter-linguistic story, it is too often as the creations of men mimicking, as ever, how they are meant to act and in this case speak and write.