From: Michael Lorrey (retroman@tpk.net)
Date: Wed Apr 09 1997 - 11:05:40 MDT
Kathryn Aegis wrote:
>
> Damien Broderick:
> >Yep, that's killed me, invalidated anything I said - what a girl, a pussy,
> >a twat, a bitch, a cunt, old, past it, a wrinkly.
>
> And thank *you* for illustrating an interesting linguistic
> phenomenon, the amelioration of female terms into the perjorative, as
> stated by Jane Mills: ...'the term for the female is likely to acquire
> negative...connotations and, once it is attached to the female, is
> unlikely to be transferred to a male unless to express contempt. Some
> linguists have concluded that this constitutes a definitive semantic
> rule.'
>
> IOW, try and find a male perjorative term that would fit into the above
> list, I doubt you will succeed.
>
Rather the converse, when a male term is used to describe a woman, it
typically is a sign of respect of one sort or another, with the possible
conditional exception of "butch". If a woman is described as having
balls, cojones, she is considered to be "macho" or worthy of being a
leader.
-- TANSTAAFL!!! Michael Lorrey ------------------------------------------------------------ mailto:retroman@tpk.net Inventor of the Lorrey Drive Agent Lorrey@ThePentagon.com Silo_1013@ThePentagon.com http://www.tpk.net/~retroman/ Mikey's Animatronic Factory My Own Nuclear Espionage Agency (MONEA) MIKEYMAS(tm): The New Internet Holiday Transhumans of New Hampshire (>HNH) ------------------------------------------------------------ #!/usr/local/bin/perl-0777---export-a-crypto-system-sig-RC4-3-lines-PERL @k=unpack('C*',pack('H*',shift));for(@t=@s=0..255){$y=($k[$_%@k]+$s[$x=$_ ]+$y)%256;&S}$x=$y=0;for(unpack('C*',<>)){$x++;$y=($s[$x%=256]+$y)%256; &S;print pack(C,$_^=$s[($s[$x]+$s[$y])%256])}sub S{@s[$x,$y]=@s[$y,$x]}
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