Please take any overtones of irritation in this post as relating to the fact that it has once again been eaten by my possessed mouse before I could post it, and not to the fair request for evidence.
In 2004 I was in a linguistic anthropology course in Florida, where we performed the following task from Michael Stubbs' Words and Phrases: Corpus Studies of Lexical Semantics:
(1) Collect your own data on the actual occurrence of words for related speech acts in phrases and texts:
* GOSSIP, NAG, CARP, COMPLAIN, WHINGE
PROMISE, OATH, VOW, PLEDGE, GUARANTEE
Study the words they repeatedly co-occur with, and use this evidence to provide a description of their meanings, including whether they express the speaker's attitude to the language behaviour: approving, neutral or disapproving.
In addition, we examined the most common contexts to determine in what situations it was most commonly applied, if there was a general trend.
I misremembered that Stubbs grouped the word "carp" in with "gossip," which he discusses here:
Does the word GOSSIP imply to you a woman speaker, or can men also gossip? To what extent do such words for speech acts carry (in this case sexist) implications about speakers? In the text collection, I found that the word also occurred frequently in phrases such as
* the mothers stood gossiping in the alleys
* the women gossiped and the men smoked
* a gossiping old woman
Men certainly also gossip (though they may call it something different, such as male bonding!), but if the word is habitually used in such phrases, then this is likely to contribute to a stereotype that gossiping is something which mainly women do. As Cameron (1997: 455) puts it: 'both sexes engage in gossip, [...] but its cultural meaning [...] is undeniably "feminine".'
There are many terms in everyday English for different kinds of language behaviour, and by studying how these terms are used, it is possible to study the logical relations between them, and whether they have positive or negative connotations. TALK is a general word. CHAT is a sub-category of TALK: friendly talk. GOSSIP is a different sub-category: talk in which secrets are revealed and/or details of other people's lives are discussed, with the implication that the topics are trivial. CHATTER is rapid talk. PRATTLE is foolish talk. BABBLE is incoherent talk. CHAT and GOSSIP need more than one person, but babies can BABBLE on their own. GOSSIP, CHATTER and PRATTLE are disapproving terms. PRATTLE is definitely insulting.
Evidence of such meanings comes from the typical phrases in which the words occur.
In our experimentation (which was rather too informal to by itself support my strong assertions above) we found that "carping" was overall less common than "gossiping," but that it had a similarly disproportionate occurrence in feminine contexts as opposed to contexts where it would refer to men. I'll partially retract my assertions, since I can't find the larger studies to support them, and say that in central Florida in 2004, a research project by a group of students suggested that "carping" was as gender-specific as "gossiping," and more strongly negative in context. It was also used by, and in reference to, mainly older people— those between the ages of 60 and 80, at a guess based on what I generally remember of our sample. I would not have made the assertions I made if I wasn't fairly positive there were other, similar studies which I would be able to cite to back it up, but to my embarassment that's not the case. But I find it not unreasonable to assume that other people may have a similar experience of the word, and so reactions to Duncan's use of it may not have been as greatly exaggerated as he evidently felt.
How widespread does a sexist connotation have to be before someone can be chastised for using the word? If Barbeloid B announces that "complain" is generally associated with women rather than men, and so Barbeloid A, telling a female-identifying poster she's "complaining", is being misogynistic, should Barbeloid A immediately step down with an apology and thanks for the education, or is s/he entitled to ask for evidence?
Everyone is entitled to ask for evidence of everything. I'd like to venture that perhaps the targeted poster is also entitled to ask for evidence that her "complaints" are unfounded. |
