Sispeak: A Msguided Attempt to Change Herstory

By * Stefan Kanfer

AS the chairperson of Senator McGovern's task force on the environment," begins Robert N. Rickles' letter to constituents. Chairperson? The title is no partisan issue: the G.O.P. also had a chairperson in Miami Beach. Thus another label comes unglued. The man and his woman are Out; the neuter "person" is In--and only the chair is allowed to linger undisturbed. Chairperson is just the latest exchange in that great linguistic bazaar where new terms are traded for old. The elderly "Mrs." and the shy "Miss" now curtsy to the crisp, swinging "Ms." "Congressone" has been suggested in federal corridors to replace the Congressman-woman stigma.

Lexicographers Ms. Casey Miller and Ms. Kate Swift recently amplified the Women's Lib party line: men have traditionally used language to subjugate women. As they see it, William James' bitch-goddess Success and the National Weather Service's Hurricane Agnes are products of the same criminal mind, designed to foster the illusion of woman as Eve, forever volatile and treacherous. The authors therefore suggest the elimination of sexist terms. "Genkind," they think, would provide a great encompassing umbrella under which all humanity could huddle, regardless. Varda One, a radical philologist, asks for the obliteration of such repugnant pronouns as he and she, his and hers. In place she offers ve, vis and ver. "We don't go around addressing persons by their race, height or eye color," says One. "Why should we identify them by sex?" Unfortunately, such designations tend to remove rather than increase an individual's sense of self. "Personalized" Christmas cards are about as personal as a paper cup.

Through the echoes of the new verbalism, one can sense the distress of that crystal spirit, George Orwell. In Nineteen Eighty-Four he posited the principles of a new tongue. "In Newspeak," wrote Orwell, "words which had once borne a heretical meaning were sometimes retained for the sake of convenience, but only with the undesirable meanings purged out of them." "Goodsex" meant chastity; "crimethink" suggested equality. "The greatest difficulty facing the compilers of Newspeak," continued Orwell, "was not to invent new words, but, having invented them, to make sure what they meant: to make sure what ranges of words they canceled by their existence."

Certainly the compilers of the new Sispeak have no such totalitarian purposes. Big Sister is not yet watching, and from the beginning the feminist wordsmiths have had to endure mockery and ridicule. Cartoonists and satirists have suggested that the ladies were Libbing under a Msapprehension. Their inventions were Msanthropic and Msguided attempts to change herstory. The Godmother was to be Mario Puzo's new Mafia novel; Womandarin Critic Susan Daughtertag was the new bottle for the old whine. Shedonism, girlcotting and countess-downs were to be anticipated in the liberated '70s. As for the enemy, he could expect to be confronted by female belligerents inviting him to put up his duchesses. He would find, in short, that his gander was cooked. All flagrantly gendered words would be swiftly unsexed. The ottoman would become the otto-it, the highboy would metamorphose into the high-thing, and ladyfingers would be served under the somewhat less appealing name of person-fingers.

Yet beyond the hoots and herstrionics, the feminists seemed to have reason on their side. Tradition does play favorites with gender. Man, master, father are the commonplaces of theological and political leadership. Who, for example, could imagine the Four Horsepersons of the Apocalypse or George Washington, first in the hearts of his countrypeople? Even the literature of equality favors the male: Robert Burns sang "A man's a man for a' that!" "Mann ist Mann," echoed Brecht. "Constant labor of one uniform kind," wrote Karl Marx, "destroys the intensity and flow of a man's animal spirits." The U.N. Charter speaks of the scourge of war, which "has brought untold sorrow to mankind." It is pathetically easy to spy in this vocabulary a latent slavery, a cloaked prejudice aimed at further subjugating women in the name of language.

No wonder, then, that the movement has set out to change the dictionary. With a touching, almost mystical trust in words, it seems to believe that definition is a matter of will. And indeed sometimes it is. The change from Negro to black has helped to remake a people's view of itself. But it is a lone example. Far more often, words have been corrupted by change. The counterculture's overuse of "love" has not resulted in a lessening of hostilities; "heavy" has become a lightweight adjective. The abuse of the word media has resulted in a breakdown of intelligence; invitations have even been sent out to "Dear media person." For the most part, the new lexicographers behave like Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass: a word may mean whatever they want it to mean. Naturally, said Humpty, "when I make a word do a lot of work, I always pay it extra." One wonders what Women's Lib's new words will be paid. They are, after all, working overtime, and against immense cultural and sociological odds.

In the philosophy of semantics there is a standard rhetorical question: Is it progress if a cannibal eats with a knife and fork? Similarly, if society is sexist, is it altered when its language is revised? Or do its attitudes remain when its platitudes change? The prognosis is not good. Words, like all currency, need to be reinforced with values. Take away the Federal Reserve and its dollar bill is waste paper. Take away meaning and a word is only noise. Changing chairman to chairperson is mock doctrine and flaccid democracy, altering neither the audience nor, in fact, the office holder. Despite its suffix, chairman is no more sexist than the French designation of "boat" as masculine, or the English custom of referring to a ship with feminine pronouns. Chairman is a role, not a pejorative. Congressman is an office, not a chauvinist plot. Mankind is a term for all humanity, not some 49% of it. The feminist attack on social crimes may be as legitimate as it was inevitable. But the attack on words is only another social crime--one against the means and the hope of communication.

For A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess created a wall-to-wall nightmare in which society dissolves into violence and repression. The condition is reflected in the breakdown of language into "nadsat," a jumble of portmanteau constructions ("He looked a malenky bit poogly when he viddied the four of us"). To Burgess, language is the breath of civilization. Cut it short and society suffocates. That is an insight worth pondering. For if the world is to resist the nadsat future, readers and writers of both sexes must resist onefully any meaningless neologisms. To do less is to encourage another manifestation of prejudice--against reason, meaning and eventually personkind itself.

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