Part Two Bias and Language

English is Androcentric

The term androcentric means centered or focused on men, often to the neglect or exclusion of women. However, peoples have claimed that our English is androcentric because men have created English and everything. Men have been oppressed women.  There are a lot of biased words in English. There are 220 English terms for a promiscuous female but only 20 for a male. For example, “womanly” means weakness along with feebleness. Or “womanish”. And now look at “manliness and manly” are means to be courage, brave, and heroism. That is very coincidence.  Some men create word that is biased word but for their own purposes.  Today, people can’t really change it because obviously, that language was not just “there” to be picked up and used by humans; our names for things are not natural- we created them. The origins of contemporary English are fantastically complicated and we can’t go right back o the beginning and plot the whole development. What we can do is look at how it is now, at the trends and biases, and then work backwards, and look at why. (page.113)

Our culture has been practically believing that men are normal therefore women are abnormal. People rarely notice the prejudice unless it affects them, so they carry on using language that is racist or sexist. I admit that, I didn’t notice the biased word in English. I just have realized that the men have the power to control than women do in the past. In our century, women are stronger than before. But the English will never change. Because it is too late. People complain that there are sexist things in the language, but they can’t think of anything inherently racist about it. Some people said that the thought and language caused this. Some say thought is governed by language, some say language is governed by thought.  But linguists believe that thought and language are “interdependent”.  However, most people usually use the men words in advertising or the debate because it will pull the people to buy more.  There are techniques that speakers use such as repetition, alliteration, onomatopoeia, metaphor, simile, simile, highly emotive language, rhetorical questions, and use of negatives and double negatives. That’s called “Euphemisms”. It means the substitution of an agreeable or inoffensive expression for one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant. I really have learned a lot from this articles.