I once shared the idea that ‘cellar door’ was considered by some to be the most beautiful sounding phrase in the English language. The sixth grade thought this was ridiculous and soon put me right. I remember  “holy macaroni” being one of their top contenders.

Language changes and feelings about words change. Even the most prescriptive linguist knows that. It’s like a cowpath.

The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay. – E.B.White

And in the case of English, the ‘cows’ are its 400 million plus people who speak it as a first language (not to mention all those who speak it as an additional language.) If you have ever walked a cowpath you will know it is not a straight line. Cows, like water, have their own logic when it comes to moving from point A to B. Ditto people and their language. 

In linguistics, pejoration means the downgrading or depreciation of the meaning of a word. A perfect example would be ‘silly’ which once upon a time meant ‘happy, blissful, blessed, fortunate,’  By Shakespeare’s time the word had come to mean …well…silly...as in ‘This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard’ (1595, Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream).

These days it doesn’t take quite so long for a word to acquire new emphasis and meaning. ‘Inclusion’, for example, used to be something I tried to embrace as a school leader – meaning that I tried to ensure all students and their families felt a sense of belonging in the school community. A worthy ideal.

This word has now come to mean something quite different, signifying the demand for men to be included in previously women-only spaces and categories. The word has become what could be called ‘problematic’ – that wonderful euphemism folks use when they really want to scream ‘outrageous and unacceptable’.

Inclusion

“Inclusion” has come to mean another kind of exclusion as in this example from London’s Hampstead Heath swimming ponds.

There are three ponds on Hampstead Heath, women’s men’s and mixed. The ‘third space’ has always been there. The decision to allow males to self-id into the women’s pond was therefore purely ideological. And it means that some women can no longer swim. @CityCorpHeath https://t.co/xE25TMqcjG

— Professor Alice Sullivan (@ProfAliceS) July 21, 2022

As a general rule, I am not in favor of supporting religious beliefs as the foundation of public policy. However, if you extend this particular thinking to other single-sex spaces – public toilets, changing rooms, prisons, domestic violence and rape shelters for example – you can see how the religious needs of a Muslim woman coincide with the needs of all women and girls for spaces of safety and privacy.  Nothing unusual or remarkable about that.

And of course, gender ideology is its own sort of belief system akin to religion. It has its articles of faith, rites, and mantras. It even has its apostates to be shunned and condemned.

But the inclusion of the ‘rights’ of one group, has led to the exclusion of another and to the loss of the hard-won sex-based rights of women.

These days of course there is a no-holds-barred onslaught on language being waged to change the very meanings of the words we used to describe men and women and indeed on the science of biological sex itself. Even the NYTimes weighed in with an oped on the topic:

The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing: Women Don’t Count  Thank you Pamela Paul.

And – oh joy! According to the UK’s premier alphabet soup charity – StonewallUK – our

“biological sex is made up of a multitude of characteristics that change over a person’s life-cycle”

I kid you not. That was a StonewallUK’s department head testifying under oath in the Allison Bailey trial. https://sex-matters.org/posts/updates/kirrin-medcalf/

This of course chimes with that deeply misleading and dishonest phrase of “assigned sex at birth”.  Imagine doctors, midwives, and parents arbitrarily assigning sex to the baby rather like college admissions folks admitting students on the basis of the school’s need to balance its demographic and community needs for athletes, flute players, mid-westerners, classical scholars, whatever.

Truth is that sex is determined at conception, developed during gestation, and observed and recorded at birth.

How that baby girl or boy develops as an individual will of course be infinitely variable in terms of aptitudes, personality, attitudes, personality, and style. All of those may change over the course of a lifetime. But sex? Never. No one has ever changed sex.

StonewallUK was once a powerful force on behalf of the struggle for Lesbian and gay rights in the UK. It has now completely sold out and lost its way. Here it is just yesterday spouting utter nonsense that flies in the face of all serious knowledge and research about child development.

If you wanted to put children on a pathway to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, lifetime drug dependency, castration/sterilization, and multiple surgeries, this is what you would tell their teachers:

Research does no such thing and Stonewall needs to stop with this evil ideology of the bonkers and bought. It is deeply homophobic. (In terms of Stonewall UK – follow the money.)

Intersectional OuLiPo

Of course, none of this has anything to do with whether you find ‘cellar door’ mellifluous or not.

And what has it to do with intersectional? 

Intersectional –  a once useful term that meant the capacity to see connections between and amongst various forms of oppression – race, sex, class etc. It really was a great breakthrough concept. Thank you Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw who coined the term in 1989.

When I hear it now my mind pictures a vast international warehouse of linked sofas stretching into infinity. For me, the word has been worn into the dust where it drifts about with bigot and literal violence.

So time for a little fun with the OuLiPo generator. It’s lots of fun to play with but it is not perfect. It often misses abstract bounds and gerunds. But – hey! – that adds to the controlled mayhem.

Intersectionality: “Inter-seduction-ality was a lived rear before it became a terrapin. It is an analytic separate, a wean of thoroughfare about idol and its relief to praise. Originally articulated on belief of black woodcutters, the terrapin brought to light-year the invisibility of many construes within grown-ups that clampdown them as memorials, but often fail to represent them. Inter seduction escapades are not executioner to black woodcutters. Perch of color within LGBTQIA+ muckrakers; glances of color in the filament against the schoolmistress-to-prize piss; woodcutters within impersonator muckrakers; trans woodcutters within fern muckrakers; and perch with disbursements filibuster politico accent — all faction vulnerabilities that reflect the inter seductions of radiation, sexism, clavichord oral, transphobia, able-ism and more”

– Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Why Intersectionality Can’t Wait,” 2015. N+7

The featured image is a detail The Field Path by  Paul Nash.