CHAT: TRIVIAL CHAT: Political spelling (was: Re: Odd orthography)

On Wed, 23 Sep 1998, Tom Wier wrote:

> one political-correctism that I detest is "herstory", based on the false
> belief that the writing of history, having naturally been dominated by
> men for the last several hundred years because of the culture in which
> it was written, was a compound of <his> and <story>, the story of what
> happened to men.  Whatever the case, this false folk-etymology is used
> with what are IMO class-warfare overtones often, and so I am always
> wary of the intentions of the people who use it.
I'm sure that "herstory" began life as a play on words, rather than as
a serious attempt to 'correct' a piece of sexist etymology.  Punning and
other forms of wordplay seem to be quite common in postmodernist
literary/cultural criticism, from what little of it I've read.  In fact,
my sense is that a lot of what we call politically correct terminology
began as a more or less tongue-in-cheek effort to 'deconstruct' traditional
society by means of this kind of wordplay.  The stifling
super-seriousness came later.  Or at least, that's my impression.

I'm actually more offended by "wymyn", myself.  Well, not offended
by the word per se.  Rather, I'm bothered by (a) the assumption that the
origin of "woman" as "wife-of-man" has anything to do with its current
usage, and (b) the conceit that you can somehow erase a word's etymology
by changing its spelling.  If certain feminists object to the word "woman"
(and there's no reason why they shouldn't, I guess), they should
propagate a new word.  Trying to revamp an old one is silly.

Matt.