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Phenomena of Sexism in the English lanusge
（作者未知） 2011/12/3
（接上頁(yè)）iterature, newspaper, magazines as well as in speech, such as male and female, husband and wife, father and mother, boys and girls, his and hers, son and daughter, brother and sister, host and hostess, king and queen, Adam and Eve and so on. No matter in books or on radio, even in daily dialogue, we can often read and hear such words:
(1) Good morning, boys and girls!
(2) They would have allowed males and females to go to school together.
Such a language phenomenon seems to appear so unquestionably natural as to be widely accepted as a language norm.
However, there are also cases in which male-female order is reversed, for example bride and groom, and ladies and gentlemen. The former shows that marriage is important to women and the latter is influenced by the notion that men should protect women. Putting ladies before gentlemen doesn’t show that women are more superior to men or ladies first, but indicates that in men’s mind, women, the same as children, are the weaker ones.
2.Semantic derogation of women
Language has a tendency to neglect women, treat women as submission and also demean women. The process of words that refer to women acquiring demeaning or sexual connotations has been widely observed, and has been called semantic derogation.
Non-parallel semantic developments of paired terms
Many sociolinguists have claimed that words become negative when shifted into the female sphere, while male has remained pure and neutral. For example:
(1) King and queen
One is masculine, the other feminine and both mean “ruler of an independent state”. King has retained its initial meaning, but besides the core meaning of queen, queen is also used as “a disparaging term for a gay or homosexual man”.
(2) Wizard and witch
Both of them can be used to refer to people with evil magic powers. Wizard also has a meaning of person with extraordinary abilities, while witch means an ugly old woman.
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