ing, it has changed its former meaning from family tutor into prostitute, and another example, “master” and “mistress” referred to the male and female school teacher, but now the word “mistress” refers to a woman who is having a ***ual relationship with a married man, and so do many other words, lord and lory, sir and Madame, temper and temptress. The female words have changed their former meanings and they have been endowed with a belittled meaning, which is the ***ist reflection in English language.
C. Sexism in English Vocabulary
Sexism exists in English language, it shows that masculine vocabulary refer to both genders, that is to say, the generalization of the masculine words.
1. Sex Discrimination and Job Titles
Inferior job titles refer to both genders, but higher ones only refer to male. In English, there are both feminine words and masculine words referred to the inferior jobs in social status. For instance, waiter and waitress, steward and stewardess. But when referring to the higher post titles, there are only masculine words, such as doctor, professor, engineer, etc. are suitable for both genders. However, these words are usually associated with masculine, if they are used to designate female, they would always be added on a word “woman” or “lady”. Such as these words a lady-doctor, a business woman-lawyer. In English, the words used to describe woman are pejorative and belittled, but the words used to describe man are positive and praised, although the man and woman do the same work in a company, people used to describe them with different words due to the social bias, for example, a businessman is aggressive, and a businesswoman is pushy. In addition, one often meets these phenomena during our daily lives
2. Man and Woman
Male are superior to females. Woman is subordinate to man. In vocabulary, the nouns ending with –er, –or are neutral words, but people think they are masculine, such as doctor, professor; engineer, etc. If they are designated to females, they always add woman or lady before them, and many professional nouns take “man” as their suffix, such as chairman, mailman, etc. Although there are many women working in the field, the word he always indicate the both genders, just as English teachers often say that nobody in the class can be proud of his English, here, “his” stands for girls and boys, no matter that there are many boys and girls in the class. The generalization of the word “he” reveals men are superior to women and men are the center of the society.
D. Sexism in the Meanings of English Words
A word, when it is used in different genders, it is endowed with different meanings. For example, “prudent man” refers to a man who is careful and cautious to the uncertainties and he acts care and foresight, but “prudent woman” is the woman who behaves in an extremely manner. And another example: “imposing man” refers to the man who looks important or causes admiration, but “imposing woman” refers to the woman who is indifferent, ruthless and horrible.
Furthermore, another word “tramp” which is used to refer to the man without family, job or money, who travels around and asks for money from others ,but when “tramp” refers to a woman, it is a mistress, obviously it is a semantic choice of social bias. Sometimes, two words point to the same thing, the linguistic senses are different, for example, bachelor refers to the single man, but the word spinster refers to the unmarried old woman, the two words are
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