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A review by sarahetc
Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women's Words by Jenni Nuttall
4.0
This book was well on its way to four stars, but then it kind of fizzled out. I'm going to call this one 3.5, since I did stay up til 1:00 a.m. to finish it. I wasn't tired, but I should have gone to sleep by 11. But I figured I only had about 100 pages left, why not go for it?
This is Nuttall's first non-academic book. I haven't read any of her academic work (that I remember) but that idea is stressed frequently at the beginning of the book. It's surprisingly engaging, tho the use of first person and inserted opinions might still be a little too far from something that bills itself not as the pop-etymology of Bill Bryon's [b:The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way|29|The Mother Tongue English and How It Got That Way|Bill Bryson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388209925l/29._SY75_.jpg|2170063], but as something closer to the informative, accessibly academic [a:John McWhorter|17151107|John McWhorter|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1551746542p2/17151107.jpg]. Nuttall is not as witty as either of them, but her choice of subjects demands to be taken very seriously.
The "women's words" she chooses are categorized according to function/event, then according to stage of life. I suppose you could also say it goes from essentialist to comprehensive. It starts with those words we use for female anatomy (and anatomy that only women have). And Nuttall does an interesting job of noting some of the histories where the historical record shows great variation in word choice. How did we get from "stones" to "ovaries?" Well, prior to the Enlightenment, most people believed that a woman was an inside-out man. He had testicles, referred to as his "stones" on the outside. They knew, for whatever reason/method/happenstance/don'tthinkaboutittoohard that women had a similar stone shaped organ near her womb, so those were probably her testicles. Same function, just inside-out (or in this case, gone outside-in). Then we get the Enlightenment and people willing to perform autopsies and while it's probably more of a coincidence that ovaries are women's gamete factories and analogous to men's testicles as gamete factories, they didn't take any chances with it and changed the name to refer to the function, not the shape. No note on whether or not the same thing happened for men, and I can't remember that much of [b:The Dord, the Diglot, and an Avocado or Two: The Hidden Lives and Strange Origins of Common and Not-So-Common Words|755862|The Dord, the Diglot, and an Avocado or Two The Hidden Lives and Strange Origins of Common and Not-So-Common Words|Anu Garg|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1442420080l/755862._SY75_.jpg|741978], only that "testicle" comes from the Latin for "witness" and "avocado" is the Nahautl word (or near enough) for testicle.
From there it goes in more functional stages: menstruation and menopause; sex; birth, breastfeeding, and babies; mothering, nurturing, and other forms of work; ages and stages (I did not know that "ghyrl," from which we derive girl, reserved for pre-pubescent females now was formerly a catchall term for prepubescent anybody. Nuttall doesn't tell us how things eventually shook out in a vernacular of boy and girl, but it makes you want to reread your Shakespeare and double check you understood); and finally violence, with a fairly comprehensive read of rape and its various synonyms, roots, and associated language of justice.
Nuttall may or may not hamper herself by reserving her analysis to documents and literature written in earliest English, as its Saxon-ness was waning in favor of the new Angle hotness, with all its Germanic syntactical tomfoolery, to the Georgian or Victorian era, depending on what she wanted to say. The Norman conquest gets the briefest gloss and I assumed it was because she assumed her reader would know all about its effect on language change; to that end she discussed a lot more of the variants in syntactic choice, the what and how of suffixes, for instance, than she did the when and why. And that's all well and good. It would have bloated the book and distracted from her larger overall point that English is, in so many ways, a remarkable language. The history of language evolution has ever been one of conquer: two groups have different languages. The two groups meet. They beef! The winners eventually override the loser's language, saving convenient syntax and vocabulary along the way, leaving little breadcrumbs of interest for anyone who cares to look. Yet Latin and French and More Latin and More French couldn't conquer the bizarre offshoot of a Germanic tribal tongue mixed with an already punchdrunk Saxon-Angle language that said, sure, we'll take some of your syntax but not all; some of your vocabulary but not all; we'll keep our own stuff when we feel like it, or not, our choice; we'll hang onto our thorn and wynn until we don't feel like it anymore; and as for the Church and the conquerors on the coast? Yeah, we'll grab that, too. We tend to think of the dramatic ascent of English as the world's powerhouse lingua franca as something that happened because America (for all values thereof). After all, English stands around in dark alleys in a trenchcoat, waiting for hapless languages to wander by so it can beat them up and take their vocabularies (and wallets, and oil) and stand over their mangled bodies chanting, "USA! USA! USA!" But no. It's always been like this. So, from Beowulf to the Industrial Revolution's end-- and most of the stuff after 1750 is euphemisms, because, jeezopete did people used to say and write the word "cunt" a lot.
There are a lot of women's words that come to mind that Nuttall doesn't talk about, but I understand that she's painting a picture, more impressionist than photo-realistic and 238 pages of this is already a lot for the average Patterson fan. And lot of those words are Third Industrial Revolution and Internet inspired. And again, her opinion on vocabulary and usage is always there to give you a little nudge toward what she thinks is best. She never does settle on a term for all the complexities of menstruation that she likes, bemoaning the fact that flux sounded great, but Shakespeare took it and made everybody understand it was only for bloody diarrhea that will kill you and 5000 of your men. I was like, "Cycle, babe. Cycle is a great word for it." But I guess that came along after the 1890-1910 cutoff. And by the time cycle came into a vogue as a polite way to discuss the topic in mixed company, flux was both a noun and a verb meaning to flow (I mean, I get it, Jenni; I do), but most often to the point of exclusively used within male spaces: physics and welding.
Okay! So, now that this review is half as long as the actual book, I will edit it up to four total stars. If you like etymology, chances are you'll like this book. If you don't know if you do or not, I don't know if this is the book I'd start with (start with Bryson), but definitely make your way back here, preferrably after you read [a:Kory Stamper|15410369|Kory Stamper|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1489017872p2/15410369.jpg] and can appreciate Nuttall's dictionary collection.
This is Nuttall's first non-academic book. I haven't read any of her academic work (that I remember) but that idea is stressed frequently at the beginning of the book. It's surprisingly engaging, tho the use of first person and inserted opinions might still be a little too far from something that bills itself not as the pop-etymology of Bill Bryon's [b:The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way|29|The Mother Tongue English and How It Got That Way|Bill Bryson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388209925l/29._SY75_.jpg|2170063], but as something closer to the informative, accessibly academic [a:John McWhorter|17151107|John McWhorter|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1551746542p2/17151107.jpg]. Nuttall is not as witty as either of them, but her choice of subjects demands to be taken very seriously.
The "women's words" she chooses are categorized according to function/event, then according to stage of life. I suppose you could also say it goes from essentialist to comprehensive. It starts with those words we use for female anatomy (and anatomy that only women have). And Nuttall does an interesting job of noting some of the histories where the historical record shows great variation in word choice. How did we get from "stones" to "ovaries?" Well, prior to the Enlightenment, most people believed that a woman was an inside-out man. He had testicles, referred to as his "stones" on the outside. They knew, for whatever reason/method/happenstance/don'tthinkaboutittoohard that women had a similar stone shaped organ near her womb, so those were probably her testicles. Same function, just inside-out (or in this case, gone outside-in). Then we get the Enlightenment and people willing to perform autopsies and while it's probably more of a coincidence that ovaries are women's gamete factories and analogous to men's testicles as gamete factories, they didn't take any chances with it and changed the name to refer to the function, not the shape. No note on whether or not the same thing happened for men, and I can't remember that much of [b:The Dord, the Diglot, and an Avocado or Two: The Hidden Lives and Strange Origins of Common and Not-So-Common Words|755862|The Dord, the Diglot, and an Avocado or Two The Hidden Lives and Strange Origins of Common and Not-So-Common Words|Anu Garg|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1442420080l/755862._SY75_.jpg|741978], only that "testicle" comes from the Latin for "witness" and "avocado" is the Nahautl word (or near enough) for testicle.
From there it goes in more functional stages: menstruation and menopause; sex; birth, breastfeeding, and babies; mothering, nurturing, and other forms of work; ages and stages (I did not know that "ghyrl," from which we derive girl, reserved for pre-pubescent females now was formerly a catchall term for prepubescent anybody. Nuttall doesn't tell us how things eventually shook out in a vernacular of boy and girl, but it makes you want to reread your Shakespeare and double check you understood); and finally violence, with a fairly comprehensive read of rape and its various synonyms, roots, and associated language of justice.
Nuttall may or may not hamper herself by reserving her analysis to documents and literature written in earliest English, as its Saxon-ness was waning in favor of the new Angle hotness, with all its Germanic syntactical tomfoolery, to the Georgian or Victorian era, depending on what she wanted to say. The Norman conquest gets the briefest gloss and I assumed it was because she assumed her reader would know all about its effect on language change; to that end she discussed a lot more of the variants in syntactic choice, the what and how of suffixes, for instance, than she did the when and why. And that's all well and good. It would have bloated the book and distracted from her larger overall point that English is, in so many ways, a remarkable language. The history of language evolution has ever been one of conquer: two groups have different languages. The two groups meet. They beef! The winners eventually override the loser's language, saving convenient syntax and vocabulary along the way, leaving little breadcrumbs of interest for anyone who cares to look. Yet Latin and French and More Latin and More French couldn't conquer the bizarre offshoot of a Germanic tribal tongue mixed with an already punchdrunk Saxon-Angle language that said, sure, we'll take some of your syntax but not all; some of your vocabulary but not all; we'll keep our own stuff when we feel like it, or not, our choice; we'll hang onto our thorn and wynn until we don't feel like it anymore; and as for the Church and the conquerors on the coast? Yeah, we'll grab that, too. We tend to think of the dramatic ascent of English as the world's powerhouse lingua franca as something that happened because America (for all values thereof). After all, English stands around in dark alleys in a trenchcoat, waiting for hapless languages to wander by so it can beat them up and take their vocabularies (and wallets, and oil) and stand over their mangled bodies chanting, "USA! USA! USA!" But no. It's always been like this. So, from Beowulf to the Industrial Revolution's end-- and most of the stuff after 1750 is euphemisms, because, jeezopete did people used to say and write the word "cunt" a lot.
There are a lot of women's words that come to mind that Nuttall doesn't talk about, but I understand that she's painting a picture, more impressionist than photo-realistic and 238 pages of this is already a lot for the average Patterson fan. And lot of those words are Third Industrial Revolution and Internet inspired. And again, her opinion on vocabulary and usage is always there to give you a little nudge toward what she thinks is best. She never does settle on a term for all the complexities of menstruation that she likes, bemoaning the fact that flux sounded great, but Shakespeare took it and made everybody understand it was only for bloody diarrhea that will kill you and 5000 of your men. I was like, "Cycle, babe. Cycle is a great word for it." But I guess that came along after the 1890-1910 cutoff. And by the time cycle came into a vogue as a polite way to discuss the topic in mixed company, flux was both a noun and a verb meaning to flow (I mean, I get it, Jenni; I do), but most often to the point of exclusively used within male spaces: physics and welding.
Okay! So, now that this review is half as long as the actual book, I will edit it up to four total stars. If you like etymology, chances are you'll like this book. If you don't know if you do or not, I don't know if this is the book I'd start with (start with Bryson), but definitely make your way back here, preferrably after you read [a:Kory Stamper|15410369|Kory Stamper|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1489017872p2/15410369.jpg] and can appreciate Nuttall's dictionary collection.