"Woman" in English Language

“Who’s in Charge of the English Language” is an article from The Exchange. In the article, the authors, Casey Miller and Kate Swift strongly emphasizes on the necessity of the cautious and prudent attitudes when writing a gendered terminology. Miller and Smith begin their article with the main purpose of their writing: “In order to encourage the use of language that is free of gender bias, it’s obviously necessary to get authors to recognize gender bias in their writing”. Stating the thesis statement in the first sentence of the article might be seen to simplistic and tedious beginning; however, it gives clue to the audience and reinforces the subject and the authors’ view for the entire article. Shortly after the introductory paragraphs, Miller and Smith write about the first exigence, “female-negative-trivial”, which is a linguistic syndrome that considers “feminine” words as negative and trivial, whereas “masculine” words as positive and important. To illustrate this syndrome clearer to the audience, Miller and Smith give an example of a pair of words related to gender words (“womanly” and “manly”) and its definitions from the dictionary. On the second exigence, “The Slippery Slope”, Miller and Smith use logos and ethos as means of persuasion to convey their message better to the audience. To explain the meaning of “the slippery slope”, Miller and Smith appeal to Douglas Hofstadter’s ethos in his book, Metamagical Themas. The idea of “the slippery slope” is simply that because common gender word and the masculine word are equal, the feminine word is no longer used. Giving a reasonable example that falls under the idea of “the slippery slope”, such as the word actress, which became archaic, Miller and Smith also appeal to logos to show the audience how this idea affects our everyday life. For the third exigence, “Resistance to Change and the Problem of Precision”, Miller and Smith appeals to all three types of appeals: ethos, pathos, and logos. Miller and Smith use ethos and logos, when telling the anecdotes of Alexander Gil and Lord Chesterfield rejecting to revise the problem of precision of the gender related terms. Miller and Smith also rely on pathos of Lynn White Jr.’s writing “The penetration of this habit of language…implies that personality is really a male attribute, and that women are a human subspecies….It would be a miracle if a girl-baby,…could escape some unverbalized wound to her self-respect.” This quote from White not only made the audience feel sympathy and compassion for the little girl, but also made the audience recognize how essential this issue and the invisible effect are. Overall Miller and Smith fully achieved their purpose by focusing on their argument with rational examples and logic.