I’ve been looking at origins of English idioms recently and one of the places that has a lot of helpful information is the Maven’s Word of the Day. If you are curious about the origins of phrases like “horse of a different color” and “grab the brass ring,” Maven’s Word of the Day is a fun place to explore.
I noticed another section of the Random House site devoted to Sensitive Language. Apparently since 1991, they have tracked offensive words using an Offensiveness Quotient or “O.Q.” While no one should be excused for using deliberately offensive language, we are often guilty of using language that is offensive to others without realizing it. I remember my freshman year of college at Tulane University. Female students found it strange when I would ask them, “How are you guys doing?” They also had the audacity to accuse me (an Oregonian) and my Californian roommate of speaking with an accent! Until that point I had always assumed that on the West Coast we speak English without an accent, unlike all those New Yorkers, Texans and Southerners! Well, to return to my point, the term guy was mildly offensive to a Southern gal’s ears. A term that surprised me on the O.Q. was “gyp.” This is a very common word in our vocabulary meaning “to swindle.” What I didn’t realize until looking at the O.Q. is that gyp is a mildly offensive term derived from a disparaging reference to “gypsies.”
The O.Q. tracks words using two criteria:
- Disparagement: degree of intent to offend
- Offensiveness: degree of offense taken
The combination of these two factors results in an O.Q. relative to other words. See Examples of How the O.Q. Works for more information. It’s worth considering how our language might be considered offensive by others without our realizing it. Peter Kirk and I recently discovered that we were using language that was mildly offensive to the other person. In that case it was a difference between British and American usage. I’m certainly not an advocate of bland language, but we should be sensitive to one another. In general, I use language on my blog that I wouldn’t be ashamed to have my children read. That goes for subject material as well.
Fascinating. And thank you very much for the OQ link, it will come useful in my current research.
One interesting item: girl, when used about a woman. I used to interpret at workshops and seminars which were usually led by men, but the audience was 70-90% female, mostly aged 30 and over. My ‘target’ (i.e. the person I was interpreting for) was an Austrian/Dutch lady and no stranger to other cultures (I’m Slovak and so were most of the participants). Every time time one of the male lecturers referred to the women present as “girls” (which would happen about three-four times a day) and I translated the word as such, she stopped the proceedings and asked me whether the gentleman in question had really used the Slovak word for “girl”. When I confirmed this, she scouted the room for any signs of outrage and having found none, she shook her head and we went on. After a few days she even brought it up in one of the sessions and asked whether the women present were really ok with this. This sparked a lengthy discussion during which the women confirmed that while are society is indeed quite sexist (or “machist” as some of them referred to it) and our language does show that, this particular usage was in no way offensive to any woman present. They have even confirmed that at least in some parts of our country (especially those where dialect is predominantly spoken), the term “girl” is preferred to the term “woman”, especially when referring to a group of women and regardless of whether the speaker is a man or a woman. Must be cultural thing, then.