CHAPTER XIII

THE WOMAN

§ 1. Women’s Languages. § 2. Tabu. § 3. Competing Languages. § 4. Sanskrit Drama. § 5. Conservatism. § 6. Phonetics and Grammar. § 7. Choice of Words. § 8. Vocabulary. § 9. Adverbs. § 10. Periods. § 11. General Characteristics.

XIII.--§ 1. Women’s Languages.

There are tribes in which men and women are said to speak totally different languages, or at any rate distinct dialects. It will be worth our while to look at the classical example of this, which is mentioned in a great many ethnographical and linguistic works, viz. the Caribs or Caribbeans of the Small Antilles. The first to mention their distinct sex dialects was the Dominican Breton, who, in his _Dictionnaire Caraïbe-français_ (1664), says that the Caribbean chief had exterminated all the natives except the women, who had retained part of their ancient language. This is repeated in many subsequent accounts, the fullest and, as it seems, most reliable of which is that by Rochefort, who spent a long time among the Caribbeans in the middle of the seventeenth century: see his _Histoire naturelle et morale des Iles Antilles_ (2e éd., Rotterdam, 1665, p. 449 ff.). Here he says that “the men have a great many expressions peculiar to them, which the women understand but never pronounce themselves. On the other hand, the women have words and phrases which the men never use, or they would be laughed to scorn. Thus it happens that in their conversations it often seems as if the women had another language than the men.... The savage natives of Dominica say that the reason for this is that when the Caribs came to occupy the islands these were inhabited by an Arawak tribe which they exterminated completely, with the exception of the women, whom they married in order to populate the country. Now, these women kept their own language and taught it to their daughters.... But though the boys understand the speech of their mothers and sisters, they nevertheless follow their fathers and brothers and conform to their speech from the age of five or six.... It is asserted that there is some similarity between the speech of the continental Arawaks and that of the Carib women. But the Carib men and women on the continent speak the same language, as they have never corrupted their natural speech by marriage with strange women.”

This evidently is the account which forms the basis of everything that has since been written on the subject. But it will be noticed that Rochefort does not really speak of the speech of the two sexes as totally distinct languages or dialects, as has often been maintained, but only of certain differences within the same language. If we go through the comparatively full and evidently careful glossary attached to his book, in which he denotes the words peculiar to the men by the letter H and those of the women by F, we shall see that it is only for about one-tenth of the vocabulary that such special words have been indicated to him, though the matter evidently interested him very much, so that he would make all possible efforts to elicit them from the natives. In his lists, words special to one or the other sex are found most frequently in the names of the various degrees of kinship; thus, ‘my father’ in the speech of the men in _youmáan_, in that of the women _noukóuchili_, though both in addressing him say _bába_; ‘my grandfather’ is _itámoulou_ and _nárgouti_ respectively, and thus also for maternal uncle, son (elder son, younger son), brother-in-law, wife, mother, grandmother, daughter, cousin--all of these are different according as a man or a woman is speaking. It is the same with the names of some, though far from all, of the different parts of the body, and with some more or less isolated words, as friend, enemy, joy, work, war, house, garden, bed, poison, tree, sun, moon, sea, earth. This list comprises nearly every notion for which Rochefort indicates separate words, and it will be seen that there are innumerable ideas for which men and women use the same word. Further, we see that where there are differences these do not consist in small deviations, such as different prefixes or suffixes added to the same root, but in totally distinct roots. Another point is very important to my mind: judging by the instances in which plural forms are given in the lists, the words of the two sexes are inflected in exactly the same way; thus the grammar is common to both, from which we may infer that we have not really to do with two distinct languages in the proper sense of the word.

Now, some light may probably be thrown on the problem of this women’s language from a custom mentioned in some of the old books written by travellers who have visited these islands. Rochefort himself (p. 497) very briefly says that “the women do not eat till their husbands have finished their meal,” and Lafitau (1724) says that women never eat in the company of their husbands and never mention them by name, but must wait upon them as their slaves; with this Labat agrees.

XIII.--§ 2. Tabu.

The fact that a wife is not allowed to mention the name of her husband makes one think that we have here simply an instance of a custom found in various forms and in varying degrees throughout the world--what is called verbal tabu: under certain circumstances, at certain times, in certain places, the use of one or more definite words is interdicted, because it is superstitiously believed to entail certain evil consequences, such as exasperate demons and the like. In place of the forbidden words it is therefore necessary to use some kind of figurative paraphrase, to dig up an otherwise obsolete term, or to disguise the real word so as to render it more innocent.

Now as a matter of fact we find that verbal tabu was a common practice with the old Caribs: when they were on the war-path they had a great number of mysterious words which women were never allowed to learn and which even the young men might not pronounce before passing certain tests of bravery and patriotism; these war-words are described as extraordinarily difficult (“un baragoin fort difficile,” Rochefort, p. 450). It is easy to see that when once a tribe has acquired the habit of using a whole set of terms under certain frequently recurring circumstances, while others are at the same time strictly interdicted, this may naturally lead to so many words being reserved exclusively for one of the sexes that an observer may be tempted to speak of separate ‘languages’ for the two sexes. There is thus no occasion to believe in the story of a wholesale extermination of all male inhabitants by another tribe, though on the other hand it is easy to understand how such a myth may arise as an explanation of the linguistic difference between men and women, when it has become strong enough to attract attention and therefore has to be accounted for.

In some parts of the world the connexion between a separate women’s language and tabu is indubitable. Thus among the Bantu people of Africa. With the Zulus a wife is not allowed to mention the name of her father-in-law and of his brothers, and if a similar word or even a similar syllable occurs in the ordinary language, she must substitute something else of a similar meaning. In the royal family the difficulty of understanding the women’s language is further increased by the woman’s being forbidden to mention the names of her husband, his father and grandfather as well as his brothers. If one of these names means something like “the son of the bull,” each of these words has to be avoided, and all kinds of paraphrases have to be used. According to Kranz the interdiction holds good not only for meaning elements of the name, but even for certain sounds entering into them; thus, if the name contains the sound _z_, _amanzi_ ‘water’ has to be altered into _amandabi_. If a woman were to contravene this rule she would be indicted for sorcery and put to death. The substitutes thus introduced tend to be adopted by others and to constitute a real women’s language.

With the Chiquitos in Bolivia the difference between the grammars of the two sexes is rather curious (see V. Henry, “Sur le parler des hommes et le parler des femmes dans la langue chiquita,” _Revue de linguistique_, xii. 305, 1879). Some of Henry’s examples may be thus summarized: men indicate by the addition of _-tii_ that a male person is spoken about, while the women do not use this suffix and thus make no distinction between ‘he’ and ‘she,’ ‘his’ and ‘her.’ Thus in the men’s speech the following distinctions would be made:

He went to his house: _yebotii ti n-ipoostii_. He went to her house: _yebotii ti n-ipoos_. She went to his house: _yebo ti n-ipoostii_.

But to express all these different meanings the women would have only one form, viz.

_yebo ti n-ipoos_,

which in the men’s speech would mean only ‘She went to her house.’

To many substantives the men prefix a vowel which the women do not employ, thus _o-petas_ ‘turtle,’ _u-tamokos_ ‘dog,’ _i-pis_ ‘wood.’ For some very important notions the sexes use distinct words; thus, for the names of kinship, ‘my father’ is _iyai_ and _išupu_, ‘my mother’ _ipaki_ and _ipapa_, ‘my brother’ _tsaruki_ and _ičibausi_ respectively.

Among the languages of California, Yana, according to Dixon and Kroeber (_The American Anthropologist_, n.s. 5. 15), is the only language that shows a difference in the words used by men and women--apart from terms of relationship, where a distinction according to the sex of the speaker is made among many Californian tribes as well as in other parts of the world, evidently “because the relationship itself is to them different, as the sex is different.” But in Yana the distinction is a linguistic one, and curiously enough, the few specimens given all present a trait found already in the Chiquito forms, namely, that the forms spoken by women are shorter than those of the men, which appear as extensions, generally by suffixed _-(n)a_, of the former.

It is surely needless to multiply instances of these customs, which are found among many wild tribes; the curious reader may be referred to Lasch, S. pp. 7-13, and H. Ploss and M. Bartels, _Das Weib in der Natur und Völkerkunde_ (9th ed., Leipzig, 1908). The latter says that the Suaheli system is not carried through so as to replace the ordinary language, but the Suaheli have for every object which they do not care to mention by its real name a symbolic word understood by everybody concerned. In especial such symbols are used by women in their mysteries to denote obscene things. The words chosen are either ordinary names for innocent things or else taken from the old language or other Bantu languages, mostly Kiziguha, for among the Waziguha secret rites play an enormous rôle. Bartels finally says that with us, too, women have separate names for everything connected with sexual life, and he thinks that it is the same feeling of shame that underlies this custom and the interdiction of pronouncing the names of male relatives. This, however, does not explain everything, and, as already indicated, superstition certainly has a large share in this as in other forms of verbal tabu. See on this the very full account in the third volume of Frazer’s _The Golden Bough_.

XIII.--§ 3. Competing Languages.

A difference between the language spoken by men and that spoken by women is seen in many countries where two languages are straggling for supremacy in a peaceful way--thus without any question of one nation exterminating the other or the male part of it. Among German and Scandinavian immigrants in America the men mix much more with the English-speaking population, and therefore have better opportunities, and also more occasion, to learn English than their wives, who remain more within doors. It is exactly the same among the Basques, where the school, the military service and daily business relations contribute to the extinction of Basque in favour of French, and where these factors operate much more strongly on the male than on the female population: there are families in which the wife talks Basque, while the husband does not even understand Basque and does not allow his children to learn it (Bornecque et Mühlen, _Les Provinces françaises_, 53). Vilhelm Thomsen informs me that the old Livonian language, which is now nearly extinct, is kept up with the greatest fidelity by the women, while the men are abandoning it for Lettish. Albanian women, too, generally know only Albanian, while the men are more often bilingual.

XIII.--§ 4. Sanskrit Drama.

There are very few traces of real sex dialects in our Aryan languages, though we have the very curious rule in the old Indian drama that women talk Prakrit (_prākrta_, the natural or vulgar language) while men have the privilege of talking Sanskrit (_samskrta_, the adorned language). The distinction, however, is not one of sex really, but of rank, for Sanskrit is the language of gods, kings, princes, brahmans, ministers, chamberlains, dancing-masters and other men in superior positions and of a very few women of special religious importance, while Prakrit is spoken by men of an inferior class, like shopkeepers, law officers, aldermen, bathmen, fishermen and policemen, and by nearly all women. The difference between the two ‘languages’ is one of degree only: they are two strata of the same language, one higher, more solemn, stiff and archaic, and another lower, more natural and familiar, and this easy, or perhaps we should say slipshod, style is the only one recognized for ordinary women. The difference may not be greater than that between the language of a judge and that of a costermonger in a modern novel, or between Juliet’s and her nurse’s expressions in Shakespeare, and if all women, even those we should call the ‘heroines’ of the plays, use only the lower stratum of speech, the reason certainly is that the social position of women was so inferior that they ranked only with men of the lower orders and had no share in the higher culture which, with the refined language, was the privilege of a small class of selected men.

XIII.--§ 5. Conservatism.

As Prakrit is a ‘younger’ and ‘worn-out’ form of Sanskrit, the question here naturally arises: What is the general attitude of the two sexes to those changes that are constantly going on in languages? Can they be ascribed exclusively or predominantly to one of the sexes? Or do both equally participate in them? An answer that is very often given is that as a rule women are more conservative than men, and that they do nothing more than keep to the traditional language which they have learnt from their parents and hand on to their children, while innovations are due to the initiative of men. Thus Cicero in an often-quoted passage says that when he hears his mother-in-law Lælia, it is to him as if he heard Plautus or Nævius, for it is more natural for women to keep the old language uncorrupted, as they do not hear many people’s way of speaking and thus retain what they have first learnt (_De oratore_, III. 45). This, however, does not hold good in every respect and in every people. The French engineer, Victor Renault, who lived for a long time among the Botocudos (in South America) and compiled vocabularies for two of their tribes, speaks of the ease with which he could make the savages who accompanied him invent new words for anything. “One of them called out the word in a loud voice, as if seized by a sudden idea, and the others would repeat it amid laughter and excited shouts, and then it was universally adopted. But the curious thing is that it was nearly always the women who busied themselves in inventing new words as well as in composing songs, dirges and rhetorical essays. The word-formations here alluded to are probably names of objects that the Botocudos had not known previously ... as for horse, _krainejoune_, ‘head-teeth’; for ox, _po-kekri_, ‘foot-cloven’; for donkey, _mgo-jonne-orône_, ‘beast with long ears.’ But well-known objects which have already got a name have often similar new denominations invented for them, which are then soon accepted by the family and community and spread more and more” (_v._ Martius, _Beitr. zur Ethnogr. u. Sprachenkunde Amerikas_, 1867, i. 330).

I may also quote what E. R. Edwards says in his _Étude phonétique de la langue japonaise_ (Leipzig, 1903, p. 79): “In France and in England it might be said that women avoid neologisms and are careful not to go too far away from the written forms: in Southern England the sound written _wh_ [ʍ] is scarcely ever pronounced except in girls’ schools. In Japan, on the contrary, women are less conservative than men, whether in pronunciation or in the selection of words and expressions. One of the chief reasons is that women have not to the same degree as men undergone the influence of the written language. As an example of the liberties which the women take may be mentioned that there is in the actual pronunciation of Tokyo a strong tendency to get rid of the sound (_w_), but the women go further in the word _atashi_, which men pronounce _watashi_ or _watakshi_, ‘I.’ Another tendency noticed in the language of Japanese women is pretty widely spread among French and English women, namely, the excessive use of intensive words and the exaggeration of stress and tone-accent to mark emphasis. Japanese women also make a much more frequent use than men of the prefixes of politeness _o-_, _go-_ and _mi-_.”

XIII.--§ 6. Phonetics and Grammar.

In connexion with some of the phonetic changes which have profoundly modified the English sound system we have express statements by old grammarians that women had a more advanced pronunciation than men, and characteristically enough these statements refer to the raising of the vowels in the direction of [i]; thus in Sir Thomas Smith (1567), who uses expressions like “mulierculæ quædam delicatiores, et nonnulli qui volunt isto modo videri loqui urbanius,” and in another place “fœminæ quædam delicatiores,” further in Mulcaster (1582)[53] and in Milton’s teacher, Alexander Gill (1621), who speaks about “nostræ Mopsæ, quæ quidem ita omnia attenuant.”

In France, about 1700, women were inclined to pronounce _e_ instead of _a_; thus Alemand (1688) mentions _Barnabé_ as “façon de prononcer mâle” and _Bernabé_ as the pronunciation of “les gens polis et délicats ... les dames surtout”; and Grimarest (1712) speaks of “ces marchandes du Palais, qui au lieu de _madame_, _boulevart_, etc., prononcent _medeme_, _boulevert_” (Thurot i. 12 and 9).

There is one change characteristic of many languages in which it seems as if women have played an important part even if they are not solely responsible for it: I refer to the weakening of the old fully trilled tongue-point _r_. I have elsewhere (_Fonetik_, p. 417 ff.) tried to show that this weakening, which results in various sounds and sometimes in a complete omission of the sound in some positions, is in the main a consequence of, or at any rate favoured by, a change in social life: the old loud trilled point sound is natural and justified when life is chiefly carried on out-of-doors, but indoor life prefers, on the whole, less noisy speech habits, and the more refined this domestic life is, the more all kinds of noises and even speech sounds will be toned down. One of the results is that this original _r_ sound, the rubadub in the orchestra of language, is no longer allowed to bombard the ears, but is softened down in various ways, as we see chiefly in the great cities and among the educated classes, while the rustic population in many countries keeps up the old sound with much greater conservatism. Now we find that women are not unfrequently mentioned in connexion with this reduction of the trilled _r_; thus in the sixteenth century in France there was a tendency to leave off the trilling and even to go further than to the present English untrilled point _r_ by pronouncing [z] instead, but some of the old grammarians mention this pronunciation as characteristic of women and a few men who imitate women (Erasmus: mulierculæ Parisinæ; Sylvius: mulierculæ ... Parrhisinæ, et earum modo quidam parum viri; Pillot: Parisinæ mulierculæ ... adeo delicatulæ sunt, ut pro _pere_ dicant _pese_). In the ordinary language there are a few remnants of this tendency; thus, when by the side of the original _chaire_ we now have also the form _chaise_, and it is worthy of note that the latter form is reserved for the everyday signification (Engl. chair, seat) as belonging more naturally to the speech of women, while _chaire_ has the more special signification of ‘pulpit, professorial chair.’ Now the same tendency to substitute [z]--or after a voiceless sound [s]--for _r_ is found in our own days among the ladies of Christiania, who will say _gzuelig_ for _gruelig_ and _fsygtelig_ for _frygtelig_ (Brekke, _Bidrag til dansknorskens lydlære_, 1881, p. 17; I have often heard the sound myself). And even in far-off Siberia we find that the Chuckchi women will say _nídzak_ or _nízak_ for the male _nírak_ ‘two,’ _zërka_ for _rërka_ ‘walrus,’ etc. (Nordqvist; see fuller quotations in my _Fonetik_, p. 431).

In present-day English there are said to be a few differences in pronunciation between the two sexes; thus, according to Daniel Jones, _soft_ is pronounced with a long vowel [sɔ·ft] by men and with a short vowel [sɔft] by women; similarly [gɛel] is said to be a special ladies’ pronunciation of _girl_, which men usually pronounce [gə·l]; cf. also on _wh_ above, p. 243. So far as I have been able to ascertain, the pronunciation [tʃuldrən] for [tʃildrən] _children_ is much more frequent in women than in men. It may also be that women are more inclined to give to the word _waistcoat_ the full long sound in both syllables, while men, who have occasion to use the word more frequently, tend to give it the historical form [weskət] (for the shortening compare _breakfast_). But even if such observations were multiplied--as probably they might easily be by an attentive observer--they would be only more or less isolated instances, without any deeper significance, and on the whole we must say that from the phonetic point of view there is scarcely any difference between the speech of men and that of women: the two sexes speak for all intents and purposes the same language.

XIII.--§ 7. Choice of Words.

But when from the field of phonetics we come to that of vocabulary and style, we shall find a much greater number of differences, though they have received very little attention in linguistic works. A few have been mentioned by Greenough and Kittredge: “The use of _common_ in the sense of ‘vulgar’ is distinctly a feminine peculiarity. It would sound effeminate in the speech of a man. So, in a less degree, with _person_ for ‘woman,’ in contrast to ‘lady.’ _Nice_ for ‘fine’ must have originated in the same way” (W, p. 54).

Others have told me that men will generally say ‘It’s very _good_ of you,’ where women will say ‘It’s very _kind_ of you.’ But such small details can hardly be said to be really characteristic of the two sexes. There is no doubt, however, that women in all countries are shy of mentioning certain parts of the human body and certain natural functions by the direct and often rude denominations which men, and especially young men, prefer when among themselves. Women will therefore invent innocent and euphemistic words and paraphrases, which sometimes may in the long run come to be looked upon as the plain or blunt names, and therefore in their turn have to be avoided and replaced by more decent words.

In Pinero’s _The Gay Lord Quex_ (p. 116) a lady discovers some French novels on the table of another lady, and says: “This is a little--h’m--isn’t it?”--she does not even dare to say the word ‘indecent,’ and has to express the idea in inarticulate language. The word ‘naked’ is paraphrased in the following description by a woman of the work of girls in ammunition works: “They have to take off every stitch from their bodies in one room, and run _in their innocence and nothing else_ to another room where the special clothing is” (Bennett, _The Pretty Lady_, 176).

On the other hand, the old-fashioned prudery which prevented ladies from using such words as _legs_ and _trousers_ (“those manly garments which are rarely mentioned by name,” says Dickens, _Dombey_, 335) is now rightly looked upon as exaggerated and more or less comical (cf. my GS § 247).

There can be no doubt that women exercise a great and universal influence on linguistic development through their instinctive shrinking from coarse and gross expressions and their preference for refined and (in certain spheres) veiled and indirect expressions. In most cases that influence will be exercised privately and in the bosom of the family; but there is one historical instance in which a group of women worked in that direction publicly and collectively; I refer to those French ladies who in the seventeenth century gathered in the Hôtel de Rambouillet and are generally known under the name of _Précieuses_. They discussed questions of spelling and of purity of pronunciation and diction, and favoured all kinds of elegant paraphrases by which coarse and vulgar words might be avoided. In many ways this movement was the counterpart of the literary wave which about that time was inundating Europe under various names--Gongorism in Spain, Marinism in Italy, Euphuism in England; but the Précieuses went further than their male confrères in desiring to influence everyday language. When, however, they used such expressions as, for ‘nose,’ ‘the door of the brain,’ for ‘broom’ ‘the instrument of cleanness,’ and for ‘shirt’ ‘the constant companion of the dead and the living’ (la compagne perpétuelle des morts et des vivants), and many others, their affectation called down on their heads a ripple of laughter, and their endeavours would now have been forgotten but for the immortal satire of Molière in _Les Précieuses ridicules_ and _Les Femmes savantes_. But apart from such exaggerations the feminine point of view is unassailable, and there is reason to congratulate those nations, the English among them, in which the social position of women has been high enough to secure greater purity and freedom from coarseness in language than would have been the case if men had been the sole arbiters of speech.

Among the things women object to in language must be specially mentioned anything that smacks of swearing[54]; where a man will say “He told an infernal lie,” a woman will rather say, “He told a most dreadful fib.” Such euphemistic substitutes for the simple word ‘hell’ as ‘the other place,’ ‘a very hot’ or ‘a very uncomfortable place’ probably originated with women. They will also use _ever_ to add emphasis to an interrogative pronoun, as in “Whoever told you that?” or “Whatever do you mean?” and avoid the stronger ‘who the devil’ or ‘what the dickens.’ For surprise we have the feminine exclamations ‘Good gracious,’ ‘Gracious me,’ ‘Goodness gracious,’ ‘Dear me’ by the side of the more masculine ‘Good heavens,’ ‘Great Scott.’ ‘To be sure’ is said to be more frequent with women than with men. Such instances might be multiplied, but these may suffice here. It will easily be seen that we have here civilized counterparts of what was above mentioned as sexual tabu; but it is worth noting that the interdiction in these cases is ordained by the women themselves, or perhaps rather by the older among them, while the young do not always willingly comply.

Men will certainly with great justice object that there is a danger of the language becoming languid and insipid if we are always to content ourselves with women’s expressions, and that vigour and vividness count for something. Most boys and many men have a dislike to some words merely because they feel that they are used by everybody and on every occasion: they want to avoid what is commonplace and banal and to replace it by new and fresh expressions, whose very newness imparts to them a flavour of their own. Men thus become the chief renovators of language, and to them are due those changes by which we sometimes see one term replace an older one, to give way in turn to a still newer one, and so on. Thus we see in English that the old verb _weorpan_, corresponding to G. _werfen_, was felt as too weak and therefore supplanted by _cast_, which was taken from Scandinavian; after some centuries _cast_ was replaced by the stronger _throw_, and this now, in the parlance of boys especially, is giving way to stronger expressions like _chuck_ and _fling_. The old verbs, or at any rate _cast_, may be retained in certain applications, more particularly in some fixed combinations and in figurative significations, but it is now hardly possible to say, as Shakespeare does, “They cast their caps up.” Many such innovations on their first appearance are counted as slang, and some never make their way into received speech; but I am not in this connexion concerned with the distinction between slang and recognized language, except in so far as the inclination or disinclination to invent and to use slang is undoubtedly one of the “human secondary sexual characters.” This is not invalidated by the fact that quite recently, with the rise of the feminist movement, many young ladies have begun to imitate their brothers in that as well as in other respects.

XIII.--§ 8. Vocabulary.

This trait is indissolubly connected with another: the vocabulary of a woman as a rule is much less extensive than that of a man. Women move preferably in the central field of language, avoiding everything that is out of the way or bizarre, while men will often either coin new words or expressions or take up old-fashioned ones, if by that means they are enabled, or think they are enabled, to find a more adequate or precise expression for their thoughts. Woman as a rule follows the main road of language, where man is often inclined to turn aside into a narrow footpath or even to strike out a new path for himself. Most of those who are in the habit of reading books in foreign languages will have experienced a much greater average difficulty in books written by male than by female authors, because they contain many more rare words, dialect words, technical terms, etc. Those who want to learn a foreign language will therefore always do well at the first stage to read many ladies’ novels, because they will there continually meet with just those everyday words and combinations which the foreigner is above all in need of, what may be termed the indispensable small-change of a language.

This may be partly explicable from the education of women, which has up to quite recent times been less comprehensive and technical than that of men. But this does not account for everything, and certain experiments made by the American professor Jastrow would tend to show that we have here a trait that is independent of education. He asked twenty-five university students of each sex, belonging to the same class and thus in possession of the same preliminary training, to write down as rapidly as possible a hundred words, and to record the time. Words in sentences were not allowed. There were thus obtained 5,000 words, and of these many were of course the same. But the community of thought was greater in the women; while the men used 1,375 different words, their female class-mates used only 1,123. Of 1,266 unique words used, 29·8 per cent. were male, only 20·8 per cent. female. The group into which the largest number of the men’s words fell was the animal kingdom; the group into which the largest number of the women’s words fell was wearing apparel and fabrics; while the men used only 53 words belonging to the class of foods, the women used 179. “In general the feminine traits revealed by this study are an attention to the immediate surroundings, to the finished product, to the ornamental, the individual, and the concrete; while the masculine preference is for the more remote, the constructive, the useful, the general and the abstract.” (See Havelock Ellis, _Man and Woman_, 4th ed., London, 1904, p. 189.)

Another point mentioned by Jastrow is the tendency to select words that rime and alliterative words; both these tendencies were decidedly more marked in men than in women. This shows what we may also notice in other ways, that men take greater interest in words as such and in their acoustic properties, while women pay less attention to that side of words and merely take them as they are, as something given once for all. Thus it comes that some men are confirmed punsters, while women are generally slow to see any point in a pun and scarcely ever perpetrate one themselves. Or, to get to something of greater value: the science of language has very few votaries among women, in spite of the fact that foreign languages, long before the reform of female education, belonged to those things which women learnt best in and out of schools, because, like music and embroidery, they were reckoned among the specially feminine ‘accomplishments.’

Woman is linguistically quicker than man: quicker to learn, quicker to hear, and quicker to answer. A man is slower: he hesitates, he chews the cud to make sure of the taste of words, and thereby comes to discover similarities with and differences from other words, both in sound and in sense, thus preparing himself for the appropriate use of the fittest noun or adjective.

XIII.--§ 9. Adverbs.

While there are a few adjectives, such as _pretty_ and _nice_, that might be mentioned as used more extensively by women than by men, there are greater differences with regard to adverbs. Lord Chesterfield wrote (_The World_, December 5, 1754): “Not contented with enriching our language by words absolutely new, my fair countrywomen have gone still farther, and improved it by the application and extension of old ones to various and very different significations. They take a word and change it, like a guinea into shillings for pocket-money, to be employed in the several occasional purposes of the day. For instance, the adjective _vast_ and its adverb _vastly_ mean anything, and are the fashionable words of the most fashionable people. A fine woman ... is _vastly_ obliged, or _vastly_ offended, _vastly_ glad, or _vastly_ sorry. Large objects are _vastly_ great, small ones are _vastly_ little; and I had lately the pleasure to hear a fine woman pronounce, by a happy metonymy, a very small gold snuff-box, that was produced in company, to be _vastly_ pretty, because it was so _vastly_ little.” Even if that particular adverb to which Lord Chesterfield objected has now to a great extent gone out of fashion, there is no doubt that he has here touched on a distinctive trait: the fondness of women for hyperbole will very often lead the fashion with regard to adverbs of intensity, and these are very often used with disregard of their proper meaning, as in German _riesig klein_, English _awfully pretty_, _terribly nice_, French _rudement joli_, _affreusement délicieux_, Danish _rædsom morsom_ (horribly amusing), Russian _strast’ kakoy lovkiy_ (terribly able), etc. _Quite_, also, in the sense of ‘very,’ as in ‘she was quite charming; it makes me quite angry,’ is, according to Fitzedward Hall, due to the ladies. And I suspect that _just sweet_ (as in Barrie: “Grizel thought it was just sweet of him”) is equally characteristic of the usage of the fair sex.

There is another intensive which has also something of the eternally feminine about it, namely _so_. I am indebted to Stoffel (Int. 101) for the following quotation from _Punch_ (January 4, 1896): “This little adverb is a great favourite with ladies, in conjunction with an adjective. For instance, they are very fond of using such expressions as ‘He is _so_ charming!’ ‘It is _so_ lovely!’ etc.” Stoffel adds the following instances of strongly intensive _so_ as highly characteristic of ladies’ usage: ‘Thank you _so_ much!’ ‘It was _so_ kind of you to think of it!’ ‘That’s _so_ like you!’ ‘I’m _so_ glad you’ve come!’ ‘The bonnet is _so_ lovely!’

The explanation of this characteristic feminine usage is, I think, that women much more often than men break off without finishing their sentences, because they start talking without having thought out what they are going to say; the sentence ‘I’m so glad you’ve come’ really requires some complement in the shape of a clause with _that_, ‘so glad that I really must kiss you,’ or, ‘so glad that I must treat you to something extra,’ or whatever the consequence may be. But very often it is difficult in a hurry to hit upon something adequate to say, and ‘so glad that I cannot express it’ frequently results in the inexpressible remaining unexpressed, and when that experiment has been repeated time after time, the linguistic consequence is that a strongly stressed _so_ acquires the force of ‘very much indeed.’ It is the same with _such_, as in the following two extracts from a modern novel (in both it is a lady who is speaking): “Poor Kitty! she has been in _such_ a state of mind,” and “Do you know that you look _such_ a duck this afternoon.... This hat suits you _so_--you are _such_ a _grande dame_ in it.” Exactly the same thing has happened with Danish _så_ and _sådan_, G. _so_ and _solch_; also with French _tellement_, though there perhaps not to the same extent as in English.

We have the same phenomenon with _to a degree_, which properly requires to be supplemented with something that tells us what the degree is, but is frequently left by itself, as in ‘His second marriage was irregular to a degree.’

XIII.--§ 10. Periods.

The frequency with which women thus leave their exclamatory sentences half-finished might be exemplified from many passages in our novelists and dramatists. I select a few quotations. The first is from the beginning of _Vanity Fair_: “This almost caused Jemima to faint with terror. ‘Well, I never,’ said she. ‘What an audacious’--emotion prevented her from completing either sentence.” Next from one of Hankin’s plays. “Mrs. Eversleigh: I must say! (but words fail her).” And finally from Compton Mackenzie’s _Poor Relations_: “‘The trouble you must have taken,’ Hilda exclaimed.” These quotations illustrate types of sentences which are becoming so frequent that they would seem soon to deserve a separate chapter in modern grammars, ‘Did you ever?’ ‘Well, I never!’ being perhaps the most important of these ‘stop-short’ or ‘pull-up’ sentences, as I think they might be termed.

These sentences are the linguistic symptoms of a peculiarity of feminine psychology which has not escaped observation. Meredith says of one of his heroines: “She thought in blanks, as girls do, and some women,” and Hardy singularizes one of his by calling her “that novelty among women--one who finished a thought before beginning the sentence which was to convey it.”

The same point is seen in the typical way in which the two sexes build up their sentences and periods; but here, as so often in this chapter, we cannot establish absolute differences, but only preferences that may be broken in a great many instances and yet are characteristic of the sexes as such. If we compare long periods as constructed by men and by women, we shall in the former find many more instances of intricate or involute structures with clause within clause, a relative clause in the middle of a conditional clause or vice versa, with subordination and sub-subordination, while the typical form of long feminine periods is that of co-ordination, one sentence or clause being added to another on the same plane and the gradation between the respective ideas being marked not grammatically, but emotionally, by stress and intonation, and in writing by underlining. In learned terminology we may say that men are fond of hypotaxis and women of parataxis. Or we may use the simile that a male period is often like a set of Chinese boxes, one within another, while a feminine period is like a set of pearls joined together on a string of _ands_ and similar words. In a Danish comedy a young girl is relating what has happened to her at a ball, when she is suddenly interrupted by her brother, who has slyly taken out his watch and now exclaims: “I declare! you have said _and then_ fifteen times in less than two and a half minutes.”

XIII.--§ 11. General Characteristics.

The greater rapidity of female thought is shown linguistically, among other things, by the frequency with which a woman will use a pronoun like _he_ or _she_, not of the person last mentioned, but of somebody else to whom her thoughts have already wandered, while a man with his slower intellect will think that she is still moving on the same path. The difference in rapidity of perception has been tested experimentally by Romanes: the same paragraph was presented to various well-educated persons, who were asked to read it as rapidly as they could, ten seconds being allowed for twenty lines. As soon as the time was up the paragraph was removed, and the reader immediately wrote down all that he or she could remember of it. It was found that women were usually more successful than men in this test. Not only were they able to read more quickly than the men, but they were able to give a better account of the paragraph as a whole. One lady, for instance, could read exactly four times as fast as her husband, and even then give a better account than he of that small portion of the paragraph he had alone been able to read. But it was found that this rapidity was no proof of intellectual power, and some of the slowest readers were highly distinguished men. Ellis (_Man and W._ 195) explains this in this way: with the quick reader it is as though every statement were admitted immediately and without inspection to fill the vacant chambers of the mind, while with the slow reader every statement undergoes an instinctive process of cross-examination; every new fact seems to stir up the accumulated stores of facts among which it intrudes, and so impedes rapidity of mental action.

This reminds me of one of Swift’s “Thoughts on Various Subjects”: “The common fluency of speech in many men, and most women, is owing to the scarcity of matter, and scarcity of words; for whoever is a master of language, and hath a mind full of ideas, will be apt in speaking to hesitate upon the choice of both: whereas common speakers have only one set of ideas, and one set of words to clothe them in; and these are always ready at the mouth. So people come faster out of a church when it is almost empty, than when a crowd is at the door” (_Works_, Dublin, 1735, i. 305).

The volubility of women has been the subject of innumerable jests: it has given rise to popular proverbs in many countries,[55] as well as to Aurora Leigh’s resigned “A woman’s function plainly is--to talk” and Oscar Wilde’s sneer, “Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly.” A woman’s thought is no sooner formed than uttered. Says Rosalind, “Do you not know I am a woman? when I think, I must speak” (_As You Like It_, III. 2. 264). And in a modern novel a young girl says: “I talk so as to find out what I think. Don’t you? Some things one can’t judge of till one hears them spoken” (Housman, _John of Jingalo_, 346).

The superior readiness of speech of women is a concomitant of the fact that their vocabulary is smaller and more central than that of men. But this again is connected with another indubitable fact, that women do not reach the same extreme points as men, but are nearer the average in most respects. Havelock Ellis, who establishes this in various fields, rightly remarks that the statement that genius is undeniably of more frequent occurrence among men than among women has sometimes been regarded by women as a slur upon their sex, but that it does not appear that women have been equally anxious to find fallacies in the statement that idiocy is more common among men. Yet the two statements must be taken together. Genius is more common among men by virtue of the same general tendency by which idiocy is more common among men. The two facts are but two aspects of a larger zoological fact--the greater variability of the male (_Man and W._ 420).

In language we see this very clearly: the highest linguistic genius and the lowest degree of linguistic imbecility are very rarely found among women. The greatest orators, the most famous literary artists, have been men; but it may serve as a sort of consolation to the other sex that there are a much greater number of men than of women who cannot put two words together intelligibly, who stutter and stammer and hesitate, and are unable to find suitable expressions for the simplest thought. Between these two extremes the woman moves with a sure and supple tongue which is ever ready to find words and to pronounce them in a clear and intelligible manner.

Nor are the reasons far to seek why such differences should have developed. They are mainly dependent on the division of labour enjoined in primitive tribes and to a great extent also among more civilized peoples. For thousands of years the work that especially fell to men was such as demanded an intense display of energy for a comparatively short period, mainly in war and in hunting. Here, however, there was not much occasion to talk, nay, in many circumstances talk might even be fraught with danger. And when that rough work was over, the man would either sleep or idle his time away, inert and torpid, more or less in silence. Woman, on the other hand, had a number of domestic occupations which did not claim such an enormous output of spasmodic energy. To her was at first left not only agriculture, and a great deal of other work which in more peaceful times was taken over by men; but also much that has been till quite recently her almost exclusive concern--the care of the children, cooking, brewing, baking, sewing, washing, etc.,--things which for the most part demanded no deep thought, which were performed in company and could well be accompanied with a lively chatter. Lingering effects of this state of things are seen still, though great social changes are going on in our times which may eventually modify even the linguistic relations of the two sexes.

FOOTNOTES:

[53] “_Ai_ is the man’s diphthong, and soundeth full: _ei_, the woman’s, and soundeth finish [i.e. fineish] in the same both sense, and vse, _a woman is deintie, and feinteth soon, the man fainteth not bycause he is nothing daintie_.” Thus what is now distinctive of refined as opposed to vulgar pronunciation was then characteristic of the fair sex.

[54] There are great differences with regard to swearing between different nations; but I think that in those countries and in those circles in which swearing is common it is found much more extensively among men than among women: this at any rate is true of Denmark. There is, however, a general social movement against swearing, and now there are many men who never swear. A friend writes to me: “The best English men hardly swear at all.... I imagine some of our fashionable women now swear as much as the men they consort with.”

[55] “Où femme y a, silence n’y a.” “Deux femmes font un plaid, trois un grand caquet, quatre un plein marché.” “Due donne e un’ oca fanno una fiera” (Venice). “The tongue is the sword of a woman, and she never lets it become rusty” (China). “The North Sea will sooner be found wanting in water than a woman at a loss for a word” (Jutland).