Language You Are What You Say The Story of Human Language The World of Doublespeak Sexism and Language
Society The Cost of Starting Families First Balding, Wrinkled, and Stoned What Makes New Yorkers Tick Looking for a Few Good Snitches
Economy Unretired: Retirees are Back, Looking for Work Tex-mix All Change, No Change Dahn Yoga: Body, Brain and Wallet
Philosophy A Definition of Philosophy——" Against Happiness In Praise of Idleness An Apology for Idlers
Chinese Culture A Chinese Philosopher The Spirit of the Chinese People Confucianism in China Ancestor Worship
Pllotics and Military Affairs The Other Side of the Coin: Reading the Politics of the 2008 Financial Tsunami The Third Race Conflict without Victory: The Iran-Iraq War Henry Kissinger' s Jewish Immigrant Experience in the Cold War
International Relations The Psychology of Power and Weakness US Primacy in the Intemational System International Relations after the Cold War East Asia: A Region of Focus and Transformation
摘要
Now let's take a pair of words which, in terms of the possible relationships in anearlier society, were simple male-female equivalents, analogous to bull: cow. Suppose wefind that, for independent reasons, society has changed in such a way that the originalmeanings now are irrelevant. Yet the words have not been discarded, but have acquirednew meanings, metaphorically related to their original senses. But suppose these newmetaphorical uses are no longer parallel to each other. By seeing where the parallelismbreaks down, we discover something about the different roles played by men and womenin this culture. One good example of such a divergence through time is found in the pair,master: mistress. Once used with reference to one's power over servants, these wordshave become unusable today in their original master-servant sense as the relationship hasbecome less prevalent in our society. But the words are still common. Unless used with reference to animals, master now generally refers to a man who hasacquired consummate ability in some field, normally nonsexual. But its femininecounterpart cannot be used this way. It is practically restricted to its sexual sense of"paramour." We start out with two terms, both roughly paraphrasable as "one who hasp wer over another." But the masculine form, once one person is no longer able to haveabsolute power over another, becomes usable metaphorically in the sense of ……
