Coming up on Word Matters, adjectives that have strong gender tendencies.
I'm Emily Brewster and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors Amin Shea,
Peter Sokolowski and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
Like people, words have habits.
Some verbs tend to take certain objects, some adverbs are especially suited for exaggeration.
Most of these habits are pretty transparent,
but today we're going to look at some adjectives with gendered tendencies that are both surprising and not so surprising.
Most of us, if we've studied any kind of foreign language,
are familiar with the concept of gendered nouns or gendered parts of speech.
Gendered nouns are having, say, adjectives that then have to agree with the gender of the noun.
especially with Romance languages, whether it's Spanish or French or what have you.
And also,
we all of us have this kind of general feeling that that's something that exists in foreign languages and not in English.
And that English is, for the most part, an un-gendered language.
We've dropped issues like that.
In a strict sense, that is, I think, largely true.
The word lexicographer does not have an ending.
that indicates whether it's a man or a woman or anything.
You would qualify either a female lexicographer, male lexicographer,