Lib Is Mangling the King's English

By Isabel Shenker

N.Y. Times Service

NEW YORK-When the 79th annual convention of the American Psychological Association opened in Washington, D. C.. Friday, the most astonishing psychological phenomena may have been the presiding officers. Instead of turning up as chairman or chairlady, each had been transmuted into a sexually obscure “chairper-

son.*

*7

This is the way the language rumbles in deference to women's liberation. The leader of the attack is Varda One, publisher of a Los Angeles underground newspaper, who complained in an interview that the English language has forced women to see themselves "through a male mirror which distorts and insults them."

IN EVERY issue of Everywoman she shatters another bit of the mirror she calls manglish. Varda One (this is what she calls "a liberation name" (others have opted for such as Betsy Warrior, Ann Fury and Dair Struggle) is high on the uses of "person" as a substitute for Mister, Missus and Miss.

Since "Mr." conceals man's marital state, many women would congeal Mrs. and Miss into like neutrality. Rep. Bella S. Abzug (DN.Y.) has opted for Ms. (pronounced MS) Varda One says congressperson Abzug misses the point: "We don't go around addressing persons by their race, height or eye color. Why should we identify them by sex?"

P

Varda One favors a Nabokovian invention "Pn." (Short for person). "I'd be Person Varda One.” she said.

PERSON H. W. Fowler. of English Usage fame. put the case flagrantly by saying. "A female is, shortly put a she, or. put more at length, a woman-or-

girl-or-cow-or-hen-or-the-

like."

Women liberationists do not like it at all. The very term "women's lib" is unpopular in some circles, which prefer “womankind.”

"How can a woman MAN the barricades?” asks Emily Toth of Baltimore, writing in Women-A Journal of Liberation.

In one English town recently, the town fathers (mothers?) could not decide what to label the municipal conveniences: Gents? Gentlemen? Men? Ladies? Women? The doors were ordered locked until the issue could be resolved.

AS FAR as many women' liberationists-members of womankindare concerned, the issues have not only been joined, but also resolved. Words ending in "mistress," such as postmistress and headmistress. offend womankind by laying undue stress on the female element!

Great old paintings are meanwhile old masters, never old mistresses, masterpieces, never mistresspieces.

On the ashheap of herstory (a word Everywoman has embraced) are antique splendors such as doctress, inventress, paintress, presidentess and professoress. Negress and Jewess survive, but not in acceptable speech. Increasingly unpopular with Varda One and others are authoress, poetess, sculptress.

As matters now stand, artisans defying the preferences of the militants say "she" (never he needs a new coat of paint, "she" (not he) needs new spark plugs. "Thar she blows!' they will say of a gusher. and advice for recalcitrant machinery is "Give her a good kick.'

??

IT IS, however, the huMAN race to which we all belong, in a word. MANkind. MAN discovers fire, invents the wheel, and is the mea-

7

RIP!

DICTIONARY

sure of all things. Great thinkers are seminal, and even non-thinkers enter the race as homo sapiens.

WOMEN'S LIB

BY HEARN

singularly ideal collective is probably "fish”-neutral as to gender, confusing as to number.)

DISTASTEFUL words for-

People still speak of Girl Friday and career girl, but not career boy. "Man alive!" is a respectable cry, but never “Woman alive!” "O boy!" never "O girl!" A Harvard man, but a Radcliffe girl.

In her book "After Nora Slammed the Door," Eve Merriam complains that "being called a girl when one is well past the age of, consent (or dissent) makes me feel that I do not have to act as a responsible adultnot yet, anyway."

VARDA ONE has found an appalling richness of words to describe women who nag, including beldame. fishwife, henpecker, shrew and virago. But no tags for male nags. "Penis envy" is in good psychological standing, she notes, but who ever heard of womb envy?

In "The Growth and Structure of the English Language," Otto Jesperson wrote that English is "the most positively and expressly masculine of the languages" he knew. When there are feminine as well as masculine forms, the

In the menagerie of metaphor, as women have discovered, the male is lionmerly applied indifferently masculine is listed first-

hearted, never woman. She must twitter her life away as a bird, chick or magpie, though Detroit's "Fifth Estate" warns that it will refuse to publish such terms.

Anyone can be a silly goose, but never a silly gander. (Among animals the

to female or male have come to stigmatize only the former: harlot, whore, wench. Some liberationists

such as Ethel Strainchamps, writing in "Women in Sexist Society"-are upset that homosexual refers only to man.

man, woman; male, female; husband, wife.

Convinced that the dictionary is the most prejudiced book in the language, Varda One is preparing a "Dictionary of Sexism." Alas, this is the King's English, not the Queen's.