to be honorable, strong, righteous, and whatever else the speaker thinks desirable. But in contrast to this, a girl is never told to be a woman. And when she is told to be a lady, she is simply being encouraged to “act feminine,” which means sitting with her knees together, walking gracefully, and talking softly.
The armed forces, particularly the Marines, use the positive masculine connotation as part of their recruitment psychology. They promote the idea that to join the Marines (or the Army, Navy, or Air Force) guarantees that you will become a man. But this brings up a problem, because much of the work that is necessary to keep a large organization running is what is traditionally thought of as women’s work. Now, how can the Marines ask someone who has signed up for a man-sized job to do women’s work? Since they can’t, they euphemize and give the jobs titles that either are more prestigious or, at least, don’t make people think of females. Waitresses are called orderlies, secretaries are called clerk-typists, nurses are called medics, assistants are called adjutants, and cleaning up an area is called policing the area. The same kind of word glorification is used in civilian life to bolster a man’s
ego when he is doing such tasks as cooking and sewing. For example, a chef has higher prestige than a cook and a tailor has higher prestige than a seamstress.
Many common words have come into the language from people’s names. These lexical items again show the importance of maleness compared to the triviality of the feminine activities being described. Words derived from the names of women include Melba toast, named for the Australian singer Dame Nellie Melba, Sally Lunn cakes, named after an eighteenth-century woman who first made them; pompadour, a hair style named after Madame Pompadour; and the word maudlin, as in maudlin sentiment, from Mary Magdalene, who was often portrayed b artists as displaying exaggerated sorrow.
There are trivial items named after men – teddy bear after Theodore Roosevelt and sideburns after General Burnside – but most words that come from men’s names relate to significant inventions or developments. These include pasteurization after Louis Pasteur, sousaphone after John Philip Sousa, mason jar after John L. Mason, boysenberry after Rudolph Boysen, Pullman car after George M. Pullman, Braille after Louis Braille, franklin stove after Bejamin
Franklin, diesel engine after Rudolf Diesel, 6 after George W. G. Ferris, and the verb to lynch after William Lynch, who was a vigilante captain in Virginia in 1780. Certainly we do not always think positively about males; witness such words as jerk, creep, crumb, slob, fink, and jackass. But much of what determines our positive and negative feelings relates to the roles people play. We have very negative feelings toward someone who is hurting us or threatening us or in some way making our lives miserable. To be able to do this the person has to have power over us and this power usually belongs to males.
On the other hand, when someone helps us or makes our life more pleasant, we have positive feelings toward that person or that role. Mother is one of the positive feelings toward that person or that role. Mother is one of the positive female terms in English, and we see such extensions of it as Mother Nature, Mother Earth, mother lode, mother superior, etc. But even though a word like mother is positive it is still not a word of power. In the minds of English speakers being female and being powerless or passive are so closely related that we uses the terms feminine and lady either to mean female or to describe a
certain kind of quiet and unobtrusive behavior. （接下页）
性别歧视与语言
（美）艾伦﹒佩斯﹒尼尔森
语言的词汇和结构，除了能进行信息交流外，在很大程度上还能反映说话者的价值观念。
任何听觉敏感、阅读敏锐的生活在美利坚国土上的人们，一定会吃惊地发现，美国英语在怎样地反映着我们的价值观念。 从动物名词代人现象看两个截然不同的标准
观察一下英语语义学中的一个领域，即英语中用动物名词代人的现象，我们从中能发现很多有趣的例子，表明我们的文化是怎样评判男人和女人的。同一动物，指女人时含贬义，代男人时却是褒义，或者是中性。比如，“a shrew”指“骂骂咧咧、唠唠叨
叨，脾气暴烈的女人”，而形容词“shrewd”却意为“处事精明果断；常用来形容精明的商人。”
“a lucky dog”或“a gay dog”指有趣的男人，但若称女人为“a dog”，她便是个极其乏味的女人了。如果再说她是“bitch”（母狗），那简直就是世间最恶毒的贬损。自信的男人被形容为很“cocksure”或“cocky”，但如果用“a cocky bitch”来指某个自以为是的女人，便不仅仅是个混合比喻而已，它实在是英语中最侮辱人的比喻。Bitch一词（大人常常告诉孩子这是一个骂人词）满含贬意，以至于生活中人们都不称母狗为“bitch”，觉得那实在是对狗的一种侮辱。我们咒骂男人时，把他与狗作比，说他是“母狗儿子”，从字面上看，这与其说是咒骂他，还不如说是在咒骂他的母亲。
说某个女人是母狐，字典上解释说这是个“脾气暴烈、尖刻恶毒的妇女”。女人好象跟具有贬义意味的动物比喻结下了不解之缘。“vampire”一词原指转世回生，吸取活人鲜血的尸体。现在这个词，广义上指敲诈勒索一类无耻之徒，狭义上却专指“引诱男人堕落、漂亮而妖冶的女人”。从这后一个意思派生出新词“vamp”，词组“the old bat”指堕落的女性，其出处一定与“vamp”和“vampire bat”二词有关。