kos@ernie.Berkeley.EDU (Joshua Kosman) (09/26/86)
In article <1992@mtgzy.UUCP> ecl@mtgzy.UUCP (e.c.leeper) writes: >Did anyone else watch Part 1 of "The Story of English" on PBS? I found >it interesting that California is now the center of the English language, in >the sense of creating new words. MacNeil talked about words coming into the >language from technology ("I'm in work mode"), surfers, Valley Girls, and gays. >In the latter category, he spent a few minutes talking about the word "gay" >itself, and also the "gay culture." Very straight-forward (no pun intended) >and matter-of-fact; I was impressed that they included it. > > Evelyn C. Leeper Actually, I found it fairly diffuse and not consistently interesting. BUT: what I thought was more than simply a matter of taste was the brief segment on feminist critiques of language. While discussing the feminist objections to words like "mankind" and so on, the accompanying film footage was of a women's self-defense class, in which we could hear instructions like "now: groin kick!" This is apparently what feminism is about: women teaching other women to kick men in the balls. I was so flabbergasted that I didn't even get offended immediately: it took a minute for the utter outrageousness of this kind of "journalism" to even sink in. Joshua Kosman || kos@ernie.berkeley.EDU || Dept. of Music || UC Berkeley ||