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Also on Voices
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What do you think about your local accent?
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Foreign Language Syndrome occurs when people with brain injuries lose the ability to talk in their native accent. After a stroke, George Reynolds developed an Italian accent.
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Page 1 of 3
 What's in a name?
Who has the power?
Taking the power back
Sticks and stones
by Dr Emma Moore, Sheffield University What's in a name?
We all know the saying - 'Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me'. As kids, we're brought up to avoid calling one another names; but the truth is, we all 'call' people names all the time. Yes, even us grown-ups. And there's a simple reason for it: naming is incredibly useful.
When we label someone, we categorise them in a way which helps us to make sense of the world. To give an example, imagine that I'm describing my new workmate to my friend, and I describe her as a 'chav'. With that one word, I've managed to help my friend to picture my workmate. We both know what I mean because 'chav' is a stereotype that we both recognise. It might not be that we both picture exactly the same kind of person but, overall, we're thinking of the same personality 'type'. That's because being labelled as something is a bit like belonging to a family - not everyone in a family looks exactly the same, but overall there are shared similarities.
So names are pretty useful things - they help us to map the world. We use them to organise similarities and contrasts. But if that's all names did, then we'd have no need for sayings like the one above. Unfortunately, names don't just organise people, they often serve to judge people too. Who ends up with a label and who doesn't can tell us a lot about the way that certain individuals are viewed - inequality or intolerance often show up in names or labels, resulting in what we might call 'language prejudice'.
For instance, have you noticed how men get called 'Mr' whether they're married or not; whereas women get called 'Miss' if they're unmarried and 'Mrs' if they're married? You might think this is no big deal, but if we use names to organise our world, what does this tell us?
Well, it seems to say that it's important for us to know whether a woman is married or not. Why? Is it because we judge women on whether they're married or not? When we look a little bit closer at gender differences, we find some more interesting discrepancies. In 1992, Laurel Sutton collected the slang terms that students used to refer to people in the university where she worked. Not only were there more negative than positive terms used to refer to women, but the terms nearly always referred to body size and attractiveness.
She found virtually no male terms that referred to body size and attractiveness - and the ones that did tended to be positive (e.g. 'stud'). You might want to try thinking about terms you hear used to describe appearance in Britain. Terms like 'cow', 'moose' and 'heifer' are frequently heard slang terms, but when did you last hear them used to refer to men? It's not that men don't get insulted or named, but how they do tends to differ from how women do. When we insult men, we tend to focus on their status (e.g. 'bastard') or body parts (e.g. 'prick'), rather than what they look like.
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Listen to the actors in Edinburgh talk about changing views. More... |
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Most of the time we don't really think about the names or labels that we use for people. But when we start to think about who gets labelled and what we label them for, we can discover something about the way our society is organised. It's not an accident that we're more likely to label women than men on the basis of their marital status and appearance. Names and labels tell us something about what the dominant beliefs are about different kinds of people. And they tell us something about the distribution of power too.
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