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In 2014, a seemingly trivial and boring incident at the bank propelled me down a linguistic road via medieval werewolves, Ms Marvel and confusingly inscribed gravestones, to find out why the English language is riddled with all this gender. What’s it FOR? How did it GET there? Will it go AWAY now please? It is, at the very least, taking up brainspace and not paying any rent.
This is a recording of a live performance at the Blueberry Hill Duck Room in St Louis, Missouri on 23 November 2019, and there were visuals happening, so I’ll drop in sometimes to explain them, and I’ve also put a transcript and pictures below.
There are swears in this. There are also arguments that will be very useful to you if you ever come up against a denier of singular they. You will definitely win.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION:
I learned a lot of Ms history thanks to this post by Ben Zimmer.
French grammar was less linguistically male-preferencing in the 17th century?
A translation of William and the Werewolf.
At time of writing, the El Dorado fire caused by a gender reveal pyrotechnic device has burned more than 14,000 acres in California.
YOUR RANDOMLY SELECTED WORD FROM THE DICTIONARY:
catoptric
CREDITS:
No Title was written and performed by me, Helen Zaltzman, and Martin Austwick, who composed and played all the music. Download his songs at palebirdmusic.com and hear more of his composition on the new science podcast for kids Maddie’s Sound Explorers.
Richard Zaltzman was played by Richard Zaltzman.
This was recorded in front of a live audience at Blueberry Hill Duck Room in St Louis, Missouri, with Dan Strickland running the tech.
Thanks to Josh Lindgren and Yuni Sher from CAA for arranging the North American leg of the No Title tour, and to Violet Dibley for research.
Find the show at twitter.com/allusionistshow, facebook.com/allusionistshow, twitter.com/helenzaltzman and instagram.com/allusionistshow.
I hope we get to spend time in rooms together again in the not too distant future. And I hope you’re safe wherever you are. -HZ
Transcript and images:
About to go onstage to perform No Title for the first time, at SF Sketchfest 2019 at the Brava Theatre in San Francisco. Photo by Martin Austwick.
HZ: Welcome to the Allusionist Live! This is Martin Austwick, the house band. Who is also my husband, in case later you’re thinking, “This seems unprofessional. There’s possibly some sort of tribunal that should happen, I’m not really sure.”
We’re so happy to be here. This is our first time in St Louis ever; how incredible to be in the same room where Chuck Berry performed so many of his live podcast shows.
OK, Martin: could you please play some dramatic music, because I’m about to tell a very boring anecdote.
gif by Eleni Kalorkoti
It’s late 2014. We’re in London, a suburb of London called Balham. It has no distinguishing features - not even a single arch! Can you imagine! What a hellhole! But it wouldn’t matter even if it did, because we’re stuck inside a branch of my bank. I’m here to get the wording changed on my bank card. ‘Miss H Zaltzman’, that’s how my name has appeared on my bank card ever since I opened the bank account aged nine. But I’m not Miss. I’m married, to Martin here, so it’s time to get rid of the Miss. And at this point actually, we’d been already married for 3½ years, so it was time to get rid of the Miss plus some more time, because unless I have a tight deadline, I get nothing done.
So this day in 2014 is the time. We’re in the bank. It’s a small branch, there’s just two bank tellers. There’s a kind of carpet smell, harsh lighting, just to give you the vibe. We step up to the counter, and I say, “Hello, I need to change the title on my bank card.”
And the bank clerk says, “Married? So you want to change your last name?”
And I says, “No, I’m keeping my last name, but let’s not go into that right now: firstly, because I don’t imagine you give a shit, and secondly for the purposes of economy in an anecdote I need to tell several years hence, several thousands of miles away; just roll with it.”
And he says, “Fine, I’m not here for a lesson about the legacies of the patriarchy. So you want to change it to Mrs?” and I say, “No, I’m not Mrs Zaltzman, I’m not married to my dad, gross!”
And at this point he is probably thinking, “Is it ok to press the alarm button under the desk, just so I don’t have to deal with this?” But instead he says, “What was it you wanted then?” and I say, “Ms” and he opens up my account on his computer and clicks on the drop down list of bank-approved titles and starts scrolling down.
Gif by Eleni Kalorkoti
Mr
Mrs
Master
Miss
Dr
Professor
Captain
Brigadier
Sir
Dame
Lady
Lord
- What - titles of the aristocracy are higher up this list than Ms? Of course they fucking are. We keep going down the list.
Reverend
Rabbi
Father
The Honourable
I’ve been suspicious of titles since an early age - since the age of five, in fact. I remember having an argument with my eldest brother, Rick, who was and is seven and a half years older than me and very authoritative. We were going round in the following circle:
RICK: Currently, I am Master Richard Zaltzman; but when I’m grown-up, I’ll be Mr Richard Zaltzman.
HELEN: Therefore, when I grow up, I’ll be Mrs Helen Zaltzman.
RICK: No. You’ll be Miss, until you get married.
HELEN: Then you’ll be Master, until you get married.
RICK: No; I’m Master now, because I’m a child. But when I’m older, I’ll be Mr.
HELEN: So when I’m older, I’ll be Mrs.
RICK: No, you’ll only be Mrs if you get married.
HELEN: Then surely you’ll only Mr if you get married.
RICK: No, I’ll get to be Mr anyway.
HELEN: Why is that? That makes no sense - if your title doesn’t reflect your marital status, why should mine?
RICK: Welcome to the patriarchy, loser! (Did I really say that?)
HZ: Now, Richard is not someone against whom you win arguments, ever, so after a few hundred more go-rounds of this, I was forced to concede, even though my infant self knew that this was some bullshit. Despite not yet knowing the word ‘bullshit’.
MARTIN: [sings] Mr, Mrs, Master, Miss,
Dr, Professor - where is Ms?
HZ: The bank clerk scrolls down and down this list of titles and honorifics, this enormous list of different ways to present ourselves, and I just want an option that doesn’t reflect my marital status, because why did all the available male titles not reflect marital status whereas female ones did? And come to think of it, why do titles reflect gender anyway? Why does anything reflect gender? What is the point of gender?
I was asking a question I am not intelligent enough to answer. And I wasn’t expecting this moment, in the bank, on a seemingly trivial and pointless mission, to be my introduction to gender studies and queer theory, but you don’t necessarily get to choose the learning moments of your life.
And in case you’re sitting there thinking, “Well. If if it’s SO important to you to have a title that does not reflect your marital status or your gender, why don’t you just become a rabbi?” Well, my family lapsed HARD. None of us is becoming a rabbi. We’d never make it. They can see the bacon in our eyes.
“Well then, why don’t you just become a doctor?”
To which I’d say: there’s no ‘just becoming a doctor’. I know this because Martin here is a doctor! He has a doctorate in quantum physics, and it took him four years to get - quicker than the American system, but an eternity in the British system - and at the end of it, he had a thesis about carbon molecules which no one is ever going to read.
CROWD: Ohhh!
MARTIN: Thank you! You’re double the readership, by me having read it and my supervisor having not read it. That’s not even a joke.
HZ: The graphs looked really nice.
MARTIN: Lovely electron micrograph pictures, if anyone’s here for that.
HZ: Has anyone here got a doctorate? [Several hands go up.] Is anyone here doing a doctorate? [A few hands go up.] Has anyone here quit a doctorate? [A couple of hands timidly go up.] Yes! Freedom for you! And well done you, and good luck to you. It’s going to be fine. (Freedom!) Anyway, back to the bank, where we’re still standing in 2014:
MARTIN: [sings] Reverend, Rabbi, Lady, Dame,
Bishop, Marquis in front of your name…
HZ: And the bank clerk was still scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling down the list, and eventually under all the aristocrat titles, and all the religious monikers, and all of the military ranks, at long last, he landed on Ms.
The end, bye! No refunds!
And apologies if I say “Mәz”, because that’s generally how it’s pronounced in Britain - I think because we’re like, “Well I don’t see a vowel so I’m not going to voluntarily do one. Shortest line between two points, that is what I will do.” I’m on your soil, and trying to code switch it to Miz, which is much easier to say, and sounds much less like your mouth has been stapled shut by a culture of repressed emotions and things. “What good is it opening it? Hmm? Keep things safe inside!”
MARTIN: Feelings might sneak out!
HZ: Noooo! I don’t think I met anyone who used Ms until this century. But it goes back considerably further than that. It goes back further than 1976, when Marvel launched Ms Marvel, whom they billed as the first feminist superhero:
LATER HZ: I showed them the cover of the first Ms Marvel issue, and she’s pretty clothed from the neck to just under the boobs. And then things get a little more bare: she’s just got some underpants and - boots? They could be socks.
MARTIN: Does her superheroing involve a lot of kicking? She’s definitely geared for lower body mobility activity.
HZ: Maybe she runs hot?
MARTIN: Yeah, it’s sweaty work being a superhero.
HZ: You can be feminist and just go out wearing your underwear… Maybe it’s all those flammable fabrics near that person smoking the cigar seemed like a high risk thing.
She was named in tribute to Ms Magazine, the feminist magazine launched in 1972 - also the year that the US Government Printing Office decided they would allow ‘Ms’ in official documents. I’m sure you celebrate it every year on Ms Day, you get your decorations from Target and you have your Ms fireworks and wear your Ms costumes -
MARTIN: ‘Misfireworks’ sounds really dangerous. Lot of injuries.
HZ: It’s a tragic day for some. But Ms magazine was going to be called ‘Sisters’, and then they thought, “That sounds like it’s aimed at nuns; whereas the magazine is supposed to be for women not defined by their relationship to a man, including their husband Jesus Christ.”
MARTIN: Nuns have relationships with several people - three people specifically, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. It’s two men, admittedly, but the Holy Spirit - I wouldn’t say the Holy Spirit is a man.
HZ: What gender is the Holy Spirit?
AUDIENT: Non-binary!
MARTIN: So actually, calling the magazine ‘Sisters’ would have been progressive - polyamorous…
HZ: I had never thought of that. I had considered how Jesus had a lot of spouses, but it’s rarer in polygamous societies that the women get to take on multiple spouses themselves. Something to think about in your theology doctorates.
They heard the word ‘Ms’ in 1969, after they heard a radio interview in 1969 with Sheila Michaels, who at that point had been campaigning for the word Ms for eight years, because she had been born outside of marriage, and she was coming of age at a time when single women in the United States couldn’t even get a bank loan on their own, so to be unmarried was a disadvantage practically and socially, but to be married usually meant to be subsumed to your husband’s identity. She said, “I was looking for a title for a woman who did not 'belong' to a man. There was no place for me. No one wanted to claim me and I didn't want to be owned. I didn't belong to my father and I didn't want to belong to a husband.”
She hadn’t invented Ms herself; she had stumbled upon it in 1961, on an envelope addressed to her roommate, and she couldn’t work out whether it was a mistake (or mstake) or whether, because the envelope was from a radical marxist organisation, it was possible they were ahead of - there were campaigns in the 20th century advocating for Ms, there were business writing manuals in the 1950s, there were letter campaigns in the 1930s; although those weren’t so much for feminist purposes. They were trying to get M’s to catch on, in order to avoid a situation where you had to take a guess as to whether a woman was Mrs or Miss, and then offended her by getting it wrong.
But it goes back further than that as well: this is one of the earliest known print versions of it, in the Springfield Sunday Republican of Massachusetts, this is the 10 November 1901 edition, which I’m sure you know, from your subscriptions, you still have it folded up in your lavatory, you’ll get to it someday. This is page 4, as I’m sure you recollect.
I owe this clipping to Ben Zimmer.
It’s not very well printed, though; maybe they were printing this newspaper with potatoes. It says:
What is needed is a more comprehensive term which does homage to the sex without expressing any views as to their domestic situation, and what could be simpler or more logical that the retention of what the two doubtful terms [that’s Miss and Mrs] have in common.
So keep the M, keep the S, lose the middle in which lives a woman’s marital status and therefore her status in society.
The abbreviation Ms is simple, it is easy to write…
“Except for us, the Springfield Sunday Republican, which we print by dropping some ink onto some paper and treading it around. We’re trying.”
This is more than 100 years after the earliest known written instance of Ms - and that’s what linguists and lexicographers and etymologists are looking for, the earliest known written instances of things so they can trace a word and its various meanings. This, as far as I know, is the first one of ‘Ms’, also from Massachusetts, on this grave for Ms Sarah Spooner, who died in 1767.
Photo from flickr.com/photos/midgefrazel, h/t Ben Zimmer
LATER HZ: This gravestone says: “Here lies interrd the Body of Ms Sarah Spooner who deceased January the 25th AD 1767 in the 72nd year of”.
HZ: And it’s a bit hard to see, but here, there’s an M topped with an S. And this was to squeeze the title into the space available, because when you’re carving a tombstone, you don’t want to go over the margins, and you can’t go back and space it a little more prudently, or think, “Did I need to make the B in ‘Body’ so huge?” Some very idiosyncratic kerning on this thing. The more you look at it, the more you think, “What a fucking mess” - look at ‘interrd’ with a little ‘d’ on top.
MARTIN: That’s implied, by it being a tombstone.
HZ: You would think. ‘Interred’ and ‘body’ are the two things implied by the whole gravestone situation. This thing is a bad piece of stonemasonry. I used to be a proofreader and her name is split across two lines - that was an absolute no-no.
AUDIENT: Yes!
HZ: And then look at the bottom - does this inscription really end in the word ‘of’? Or was the stonemason just like, “You know what? No one reads down to the grass. This hand’s tired, I’m off.”
MARTIN: Or do you this stonemason was an innovator in the use of the cliffhanger? Maybe the rest of the gravestone is on an adjacent grave.
HZ: “Come back in the next life…” So although this might appear to be a linguistically significant artifact, containing the earliest known written instance of Ms as far as we know, it might just have been a mistake, they could have just been trying to write, ‘Here lies mustard fan Sarah Spooner’ oh shit I’ve run out of room. Can’t trust it.
gif by Eleni Kalorkoti
But even if they did mean to carve some kind of title, it’s hard to know whether that would have been Miss or Mrs because then, in 1767, those words were kind of the same thing. They were both just shorter forms of the same word, ‘mistress’, which was the title for women above a certain rank in society, and below that rank, it was no titles, just first names. So when you watch something that’s depicting the class system, like most British dramas - like Downton Abbey, have you seen Downton Abbey? I haven’t, but I’m going to take a stab. So if you have a senior member of staff at Downton Abbey, the housekeeper will be called Mrs -
AUDIENCE: Hughes.
HZ: Hughes? OK. And then there’ll be a kitchenmaid called Gladys or Elsie or something? Susan?
AUDIENCE: Daisy.
HZ: Daisy. Great! Thank you.
MARTIN: This is a much more Downton-savvy crowd than we’re used to. You can normally just bluff it and they think you’re an expert, but you’re not going to get past this lot.
HZ: Do you want to get spoilers for every season and the film?
AUDIENT: Nooo!
MARTIN: Oh no, someone hasn’t seen the film, “Don’t tell me!”
HZ: I heard a lot of it is about cleaning. That put me off. Doesn’t sound super-entertaining. But maybe they do it in a jaunty way? In the Downton case - well, in the case I’ve used of your examples of people of Downton -
MARTIN: Mrs Hughes and Susan -
HZ: DAISY.
MARTIN: Daisy! Sorry.
HZ: Susan’s the main cleaner in the film, and she left an egg on someone’s chair. She’s a villain! Ahem. In their cases, it’s not about marriage, it’s seniority. And around the time Sarah Spooner died, in 1767, Miss was for children, Mrs was for adults, there was no marital implication in either - just like Master and Mr, so tell my brother Rick that I was right! Although my timing was bad; I was right for the mid-1760s not mid-1980s. A very different time.
And then Mister - I found this interesting - 600 or so years ago, the honorific for men above a certain rank was Master; Mister was just a pronunciation variant that later came to dominate, and by 19th century Master was just for boys.
Unless any of you use it - no shade if so, do you?
MARTIN: That guy does.
HZ: Really? What kind of response does it get? Do people think you’re doing a “Master Bruce” sort of thing?
AUDIENT: They just let it go without comment.
HZ: Really? That’s disappointing.
AUDIENT: I know!
MARTIN: There’s Master Sergeant, isn’t there, and actually I have a masters degree, so I could call myself ‘Master’ if I wanted to.
HZ: Oh, wow, really, Martin, you’re so incredibly qualified, what a lot of degrees, wow.
MARTIN: Rappers could do it, because if you’re an MC you’re a Master of Ceremonies, so MC Hammer could call himself Master Hammer. Dr Dre gets to use his title all the time; why doesn’t MC Hammer? Eh?
HZ: Do we know what Dr Dre’s doctorate is in?
MARTIN: I don’t think he’s got one. He did get locked in a legal battle with a gynaecologist called Dr Drai, author of 20 Things You May Not Know About the Vagina. You’ve probably heard of him.
HZ: Who won?
MARTIN: Dr Drai.
HZ: In English, Mrs and Miss used to be used as the female titles are in other languages, like in Italian it’s Signora for older women, and Signorina for younger women and flirting, which is obligatory there. I spent some time there when I was 18, and you just go up the street and if there are men there, they have to acknowledge your presence. So you walk and they go:“Signorina (I have to do it, it’s the law), Signorina (I’m so tired), Signorina (well I don’t know - if I don’t acknowledge a woman, the apocalypse might come), Signorina…”
And then I went back at 27 and I was getting “Signora” and I thought, “Should I be offended?” Because I don’t know what’s valuable there, is it youth or is it agedness? Then recently I saw a friend of mine, Jonathan, who’s from Italy, and he said said, “Yeah, Signora means you’re past it.”
MARTIN: Over the hill! At 27.
HZ: It’s fine, because I don’t get my self-esteem from being catcalled on the streets of Italy, it’s fine. So I said, “Presumably they don’t go ‘Signorina’ at children, do they?”
And he said, “No, no, no; when you’re young, you’re ‘bambina’, then you become signorina when you get your period.”
And I was like, “How do they know?”
And he said, “Well, basically, your grandmother asks you every week, ‘Are you Signorina yet?’”
Then presumably she puts it on some kind of intranet so everyone knows? I don’t like this system.
And then ‘Miss’ is a complicated one. At that time of Sarah Spooner’s tombstone, 1767, if you called an adult woman ‘Miss’, that meant she was a sex worker. But shortly after that, Miss got purloined by young adult women who were not sex workers, but they didn’t want to use Mrs, because they wanted to show off that they were younger than the women using Mrs, and also possibly demonstrate they’re available for marriage, so that might have been where this marital distinction came in.
And there’s some interesting movements in other cultures: in Germany they have Frau and Fräulein - well, they had them. Fräulein was the equivalent to Miss, literally translates to ‘little woman’, but it has been banned from official use since 1972. And in France, their version of Miss - or young woman flirt word - ‘mademoiselle’, has been banned from official documents since 2012, and a female person of any age will be Madame. And this might not sound like much, but in France, the whole language is binary gendered: every noun, every adjective, every pronoun. So if like me you want to get away from a binary-gendered system of everything, France is not going to let you forget it. And also, the language is controlled by the Académie Française, an official body which gets to decide what new grammar is allowed, what new words are allowed in, and when people have campaigned for gender neutral options, the Académie Française has just been like, “Non.”
So this Mademoiselle thing was at least some progress, with that backdrop. But the problem wasn’t so much why do the female titles change whereas the male ones don’t because they just use Monsieur - the male equivalent, Mondamoiseau, fell out of use - it’s so hard to say, that’s probably why. My mouth was exhausted after just one go-through. The problem was actually the etymology of Mademoiselle: it is kind of a diminutive form of ‘Madame’, which breaks down to ‘my lady’, but the problem in particular was this suffix, ‘oiselle’, which means ‘virgin’ or ‘simpleton’.
So this flirt word means ‘my lady virgin simpleton’.
MARTIN: Did they basically invent negging? Is that French’s claim to fame?
HZ: Yeah, très sophistiqué, oui.
Ugh!
So that’s why Ms was brought in to cut through all this mess - centuries of mess, and centuries, it felt like, of standing in my bank while he scrolled down miles and miles of this list to get to Ms; and by the time he got to it, I didn’t even want it any more.
LATER HZ: Background information: I’m wearing a black sequinned dress with the word ‘Ms’ on the front in white. And at this moment, I raise my hand, and wipe the Ms off. (How’s it done? Magic! (No, it’s two-way sequins. Still pretty magic.))
HZ: I didn’t want any title at all. And the thing is, I had never actually wanted a title on my bank card. Back in 1989 when I opened the bank account in the first place, I asked, “Do I need this? Can’t I just be H Zaltzman or Helen Zaltzman?” And they said, “No! You have to have Miss on there, otherwise if a man steals your card, we won’t know you’re supposed to be a little girl, and he could take all your money!”
MARTIN: But Helen, you’ve met men. That’s exactly the kind of thing a man would do
HZ: Not to be glib about the crime of fraud, but I will take that risk, because there have been a number of occasions where someone has tried to commit fraud as me, and every time they’ve given themselves away by incorrectly spelling my last name. It’s not even that hard; it’s eight letters. But I think what happens is, people see the letter Z and they just panic. Even when I’m spelling it out letter by letter, they go, “She can’t mean that, I’ll correct it.”
This is a handful of the common incorrect spellings of my name.
LATER HZ: Zaltman, Saltman, Zalpzan, Salzman, Soltan, Saucepan…
HZ: So, I didn’t want a title because then or now, I don’t feel like any particular gender, it just feels like a system that’s been imposed upon me; it doesn’t feel important to who I am. Definitely doesn’t feel important enough to arrange so much of society around. Definitely doesn’t feel important enough for parties where planes crash or deserts catch on fire, the gender reveal party - you don’t even know yet. Unborn children cannot declare this.
There are, of course, gender-free titles that don’t require spending 4+ years getting a doctorate. (You’re going to be fine. Good luck! Freedom!!) A couple of years ago, HSBC Bank added twelve gender-free title options - not my bank - and here are just a few of them: one of them was Ind, short for individual. Pr, short for person. This one is incredible -
LATER HZ: Spelled Mre…
HZ: Mystery! Do any of you go by Mre? Will any of you go by Mre by tomorrow morning? Yes! And then I think this is the gender-free title I’ve seen the most of: Mx. Mix or Mux, I hear both pronunciations; Mix because it’s easier to say, Mux because some people don’t want it to be mistaken for meaning a mixture of genders. And other people are just British and “don’t want to say a vowel unless I see a vowel! Unless you pay me, I won’t say the vowel.”
When I’m filling in a web form or something and they have the compulsory drop-down list of titles - which I think happens more outside the States than in it, to be honest - if they have a gender-free title, I’m a bit better disposed to whatever company it is. I think, “At least they get it.” Unlike this one I encountered just a few days ago:
LATER HZ: The only options are Mr, Ms and Mrs. Had another one just today!
HZ: Not even allowing me to go for whatever the silliest option is! Because, not going to lie, I’ve been a brigadier a few times. I don’t know what the legality is of that. But if they are so beholden to gender, then I’m going to fuck with the system.
But then a few months ago we were in Australia performing some shows, and someone tweeted me to say, “This is the list of titles I had to choose from just in order to buy a ticket for your show from that theatre.”
LATER HZ: “Select title from: Mr Mrs Miss Ms Dr Prof Sir Item Other”
HZ: And they said, “There’s a Sir but no Dame?” And I was like, that’s relevant to a very few people, particularly in Australia - but ‘Item’?? Do you get a lot of inanimate objects going to see shows?
But gendered or gender-free, what is the point of titles? What is the point of them? Other than signalling to people that you spent four years of your life studying the electro spin resonance of carbon 60 molecules like Martin here. Was it worth it, Martin?
MARTIN: No, of course it wasn't, no, absolutely not. I'm sorry, people doing a PhD. If you’re doing it, just get to the end and then run, don't let them suck you in for postdoc work, please. That's how it starts: you do a couple of graduate-level courses, and then it's a master's degree and pretty soon you're four years into a PhD and there's no light at the end of the tunnel. Sorry, what was the question?
HZ: There's no light at the end of the carbon nanotubes. We could shine a light in there.
MARTIN: A tiny light.
HZ: There's some good things about it, surely? Because firstly, you don't have the “I don't want my title to reflect my gender or my marital status” - maybe though, as a cis man, you never gave it a thought.
MARTIN: It's very nice to be freed from those judgments when you're using your title.
Helen Zaltzman and Martin Austwick performing No Title. Photo by Baranduin Briggs
HZ: But also sometimes like when we're at a restaurant and someone gives you your bank card back and they're like, “Doctor Austwick”, isn't that cool?
MARTIN: You’re making me sound like a real twat. Yeah, that was exciting for about six months.
HZ: What happens if someone's like, “There's an emergency! Is there a doctor in the house?” And you're like, “Well, technically.”
MARTIN: I could be helpful, if it's a quantum physics based emergency.
HZ: If.
MARTIN: If someone's not sure if their cat's dead or not. Or maybe someone's got a little bit of carbon nanotube in their eye - it's an irritant apparently - I could chuck a bucket of water on them, you know, make myself useful.
HZ: Do these things come up?
MARTIN: It hasn't come up yet. In the last 15 years or so.
HZ: But what they’re like, “No, Martin, I meant a real doctor”?
MARTIN: Oh, yeah, come on, I am a real doctor.
HZ: “Yes, you see I am a real doctor because doctor is from the Latin verb ‘docere’ meaning ‘to teach’, and the first doctors were people who had finished all their degrees and were licenced to teach - and actually the first doctors were people licenced to teach Christian theology and scripture, nothing to do with medicine, but then in 1213, the Pope granted the University of Paris a universal licence to teach and from thereon, fields of study were divided into theology, law and medicine, different doctorates for each, which is why they have different letters after their names, which is why your medical doctor - the fake doctor - has MD after their name; but before that, medical doctors - fake doctors - were known as leeches; no, not actually after the blood-sucking creature, which, well done, was used in medical treatments, but actually a word that etymologically meant healer or enchanter, but do you want to go to another etymological rabbit hole during a medical emergency? In short, medical doctors are not the real doctors, they're a subset of real doctors, so yes, I am a real doctor - oh, you've died. Well, you should have asked for a physician in the first place.”
MARTIN: Have you been reading my journal?
HZ: Absolutely not. Lovely graphs in it though.
So what is the point of titles? My instinct is that we don’t need them in English, but I may be overlooking reasons why they are useful; and I am a comfortably off white woman, so I haven’t had to fight for recognition just as a human. So maybe I can dismiss these signs of respect because I haven't had to demand respect as a human being. But on the other hand, maybe there are different ways to demonstrate respect to fellow human beings rather than this system, which I think I have argued is flawed.
But also there are other places that don't use them. I was chatting recently to a British friend in Sweden and she said, “In Sweden, no one uses titles; it’s just straight in with first names in every circumstance. So why did I bother getting a doctorate in archaeology?”
But then I was thinking, okay, but what role do titles play in just, I suppose, the negotiation of approach with another person, or intimacy, because you have these different layers of intimacy that are implied by what you're allowed to address someone as. And some languages do this without titles, so in Russian, you have a fairly codified system of three names, you have your first name, so give an example something like ‘Vladimir’; then you have your patronymic, which is a name based on your father's first name with a suffix. So if your father was also called Vladimir, your patronymic will be ‘Vladimirovich’. And then your last name, your family name, would be something like, I dunno, just to pick an example, ‘Putin’. Just an example. It's just an example.
So your official name on documents and stuff would be the full three names: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. That’s very formal though. People who were actually addressing you would just use the first two names, Vladimir Vladimirovich; that's the respectful form of address, first name and patronymic, but then, that’s for people who don’t really know you. People who know you a bit better would call you by your first name, Vladimir; but your friends would call you by a short form of your first name, so in Vladimir’s case something like Vova or Volodya; then your really close intimates would call you by a diminutive form of your first name, so Volodka, Vovochka, or Vladi, Vlad-vlad, Vladdles, Vladikins - that’s for people you’re very close to, though, like your family or foreign democratic processes.
In English, it’s less codified, but I think titles are part of this concoction. Politeness is really tricky and very detailed. And it's kind of a currency in Britain, politeness - on a micro level, because obviously on a global level, we're not that polite, which I believe you're familiar with in the US, you have observed the British tendency to come to a place and be like, “Oh, hello, terribly sorry to bother you, but this place, oh, it's mine now. I hope you don't mind. No, it's fine, you’ll barely notice I'm here - but no, it's definitely mine. Oh, the place had a name, did it? Oh, that's sweeet; but I'm going to name it after the town in England where my nanny's from, because I'm homesick. No, no, I'm afraid it's mine. I’ve licked it now, so it's definitely mine.”
But there’s a lot of linguistic contortion to be polite, whether superficial or not; and yet so many ways in which the English language is sneakily impolite, and I think gender is one of those. Like jobs! Why do you need words like waiter and waitress, actor and actress? I have female actor friends who say it's not worth calling yourself an actor because then you're branded a troublemaker in the industry. And I learned something interesting about the word ‘seamstress’. Because I thought, “Well, I know the word ‘seamstress’, a female sewist; and I don't know the male equivalent” - turns out the male equivalent is ‘seamster’, which I've never heard anyone actually use; I think usually a man whose job is sewing will be called a tailor, because it sounds more high-ranking, right? And they get paid more. But ‘seamster’ used to mean a woman whose job is sewing and then they're like, “Doesn't sound feminine enough. Let's make it sound more feminine. Seemstress seemstress, put some more ribbons on it reduce the money, ribbons, seemstress.”
There are other words where I can't think of the male equivalent, like ballerina - I've never heard ‘ballerino’, but it exists. And I still hear a lot of people who cannot remember what you're supposed to call a male flight attendant. “Stewardesser?”
I have a love trick, whenever my mum says, “There was a wonderful male nurse,” I go, “Or: a nurse.” “There’s a marvellous female principal.” “Or: the principal.” She loves it. Is very grateful for it.
MARTIN: I am so much looking forward to Christmas coming around again.
HZ: But English is a less gendered language than many. A lot of languages, all the words, all nouns and adjectives are gendered male or female; some of them have other genders as well, like neuter; or they'll have a specific gender for something like animals. And I've been trying to see if there any particular patterns in the ways that gendered language is gender things. So at the moment, I've got a spreadsheet and - yes, don't get jealous, you can all have one - I've got columns along the top for different languages: so far, I've got Spanish, German, Hindi, Portuguese, Italian, and Greek. And then in the rows, I've got nouns in different categories. And I've just been trying to see if I can deduce anything from the ways that they gender different words. And so far I have learned that dog is male in all of them. bears are always male except female in Greek, lions are also male except neuter in Greek, and whales are always female except male in German - but in German a baby is neuter. But a spoon is masculine, a fork is feminine, a knife is neuter - which is not how I would have gendered the cutlery, if forced to do so.
And then in all of the languages except German, a chair is feminine, as if to say, “Well, it's got legs and a back, so maybe at some point I’ll want to fuck it.”
English used to be grammatically gendered in this way as well, but most of it disappeared around seven hundred years ago, to free up the brain space to go, “Oh I'm terribly sorry…” It’s a lot of cognitive overhead if you're trying to use one of the languages where everything is gendered and you’re like, “Shit, shit, what form of the adjective does this noun take? Argghhhh!” we could use that brain space for other things, or just for using our brains less. A lot of my arguments for gender-free language are because I'm lazy and I want to use my brain less, which I think is quite practical. Or I just think couldn’t we make gender opt-in rather than default? It's absolutely fine if you want to be a seamstress or Master or Mrs, but just it's making an active choice rather than the default. And then people would have to spend a lot less time worrying about how to guess these things.
But of course, there's there's a lot of gender still in language. Words like ‘manhole’. Interestingly, a few months ago, the city of Berkeley, California, passed an ordinance so that official writing would be free of gendered language, and manholes will now be called ‘maintenance holes’ or ‘utility holes’ or ‘sewer holes’. Yes! Because all genders should be allowed to go down a hole into the sewer!
Something we've been trying to figure out as well as what is a gender neutral term for a ‘snowman’ - what do you reckon? ‘Snow person’?
MARTIN: Snowpal.
HZ: ‘Snowpal’ - but what if they’re your enemy, Martin? Well, you clearly get on, but other people might not get on with their snow -
MARTIN: Snow enemy? Snowenemy. Snowquaintance.
HZ: Snowquaintance. It is suitably chilly, I suppose.
But there’s so much evidence gender bias in language, and it doesn’t necessarily go both ways. For instance, you have names that used to be predominantly given to male babies, like Lindsey, Alison, Hilary, Evelyn, that are now predominantly given to female babies - but it doesn't tend to happen the other way around. I haven't seen a trend for calling male babies ‘Jennifer’. Although a few weeks ago, a male friend of mine called Whitney came to see the show and he was like, “You don't know what I've been through.” So he is the counterexample.
And then things like throwing like a girl's bad, crying like a girl's bad, laughing like a girl's bad; but manning up is good, shouldering along manfully is good, growing a pair is good, being ballsy is good.
Listen.
That is not where courage lives. It's just cold storage.
MARTIN: It’s like spunk fridge.
HZ: Martin.
MARTIN: Like a beer fridge, for spunk.
HZ: Martin - seriously, can we turn his mic down?
MARTIN: Bit smaller than a beer fridge.
HZ: And then you can call a mixed gender group ‘guys’ or even an all-female group ‘guys’, but if you call it an all male-identified group ‘gals’ or ‘ladies’, that is fighting talk. At the moment. Because language can change; and language can change fast. And in fact, social change is often evident in language before you've necessarily even registered it in society itself; and that's because people use language the ways they need to use it. And you can try to insist that language should be used ‘properly’, according to previous usage, but you will be knocked off your feet by a tide of progress. Like what is happening at the moment with the singular they. And I hear from so many people complaining about this - I hear from a lot of people complaining generally, their complaints can usually be boiled down to, “I don’t want to! It’s confusing! I fear change! It's like when I went to the supermarket and they rearranged all the aisles and now I can't find the bread!”
So I like to have an argument ready for every occasion, thanks to my upbringing. And I have a wardrobe full of ways to refute the deniers of singular they, and I have to use them many times a week, and I'm going to share them with you, in case you ever need to use them as well, because I always win. And so you will always win.
Reason one: singular they is old. It’s really old. The first recorded written instance - as I said earlier, that's what linguists and etymologists are looking for - the first recorded written instance of singular they is from 1375, in an English translation of a French romance story called ‘William and the Werewolf’. Like an early Twilight. I hear from a lot of people complaining about linguistic things, and a lot of the time I can just say, “Well, actually, it's old,” and that shuts them right up. They love things to be old, like their opinions.
Reason two: singular they was fine until a bunch of 18th century grammarians invented a whole load of new rules for the English language, because they thought it should behave like classical Latin - even though it doesn't, and these people have a lot to answer for, because you often come up against the English language making no sense, and it's their fault. Because it's like you get the manual for a washing machine and you're supposed to understand how your car works. So they invented roles like split infinitives are banned, because you couldn't split an infinitive in Latin because it was all one word; but English is not Latin. They also invented a fake B for the word ‘debt’, and a fake L for the word ‘salmon’.
Now, are you just gonna let a bunch of dead grammarians push you around? Resist! No L in salmon anymore!
Reason three: There are a lot of languages that do not use gender pronouns. In fact, some of you probably speak one, like Tagalog, Turkish, Māori; this means millions and millions of people in the world are not using gender pronouns - and surviving.
Reason four: don’t like singular ‘they’? You’re probably already using it, it’s a very common construction, like if someone says, “I’m going to stay with my cousin this weekend” and you say, “Oh, where do they live? Arghhh! Traitorous mouth, what just came out of you? Could it be that I only don't like it when there's the implication of some kind of social change attached? Hmmm. I’ll deal with you later.”
Reason five - no one ever gets past this one, this is a slamdunk reason: we’re already using a plural pronoun as singular, and it is ‘you’. Yeah! What the fuck happened here, huh? Well, it used to be that ‘thou’ was the singular form, and ‘you’ was the plural form and also the polite form. And people were so polite - or at least linguistically polite - that the informal form ‘thou’ just disappeared. “Hmm, I've only ever used ‘thou’ actually, yes, you've never caught me - oh, dammit! Grrrrrr! Hmmmm. Fine. I suppose you came at me with etymology, and my prejudice couldn't withstand the etymology. You've really changed my life in the last twenty seconds.”
gif by Eleni Kalorkoti
So those are my reasons. What have you got? Come at me.
No one ever wins. You're welcome.
The plot of ‘William and the Werewolf’, the medieval romance - well, it’s not between William and the werewolf, it’s more of a bromance: William is a prince, the heir to the throne of Apulia in Italy. But his uncle plots to kill him so that his uncle can become king. Somehow a werewolf finds out about it, and decides to snatch the toddler prince William and runs away with him and hides him in a forest so that he’s safe. And then a cowherd finds him and raises him as his own. Filler filler filler, William grows up; he falls in love with Emilior, the daughter of the Emperor of Rome; then there’s some filler and a lot of warfare, Emilior is promised in marriage to the son of the Emperor of Greece, so the night before the wedding, she and William run away, disguised as bears.
The werewolf has somehow been keeping tabs on them this entire time, so he helps them escape: he steals wine for them, he gives them a bag of beef to eat, and to put them off the scent he kills a couple of deer so they can disguise themselves as deer instead.
MARTIN: That’s just unnecessary. He only needed to kill one deer, and then they could do a kind of pantomime horse, one in the front, one in the back - a much more accurate reflection of the deer’s muscular structure.
HZ: You don't see many upright deer, so you would think people would assume something’s wrong. Also what if someone hunts them? There’re a lot of questions that are unanswered by this translation. But then the werewolf steals a ship, and he scares all the crew onto the shore and puts William and Emilior on the ship and sails to Sicily, and they make their way to the capital Palermo and the wolf is like, “I know a hiding place in the Queen of Palermo's garden.” She looks out of her window and sees, asleep on her lawn, a couple disguised as deer, and thinks, “Oh, I should go and talk to them. But I don’t want to scare them, so I will also disguise myself as a deer, an outfit I just happened to have ready for this kind of occasion.” So she invites them into her palace - they have a bath, FINALLY - then there’s a load more war, William captures the King of Spain. The Queen of Palermo realises that William is her long-lost son! The King of Spain realises the werewolf is his long-lost son, Alphonse! Who as a baby was turned into a werewolf by his jealous stepmother! And now, she’s like, “Oh, sorry,” turns him back into a man, everyone’s like, “Oh, he’s so handsome,” then William marries Emilior; Alphonse the ex-werewolf marries William’s sister; the Emperor of Rome says, “Look after the poor and don’t tax them too much,” and then he dies and William becomes the Emperor of Rome, The End.
And that's the history of singular thay. With a little socialist message just snuck in at the end.
I think the reason why ‘they’ sticks is because it's a word we already know. And it's a lot easier for people to absorb a new use of a word they already know than it is for a completely new coinage to catch on. But there have been a lot of new gender-neutral pronouns suggested for English, more than 100. This just a few - some of them go back a long way - ‘ip’, that’s from 1884. I quite like it, it’s cheerful sounding.
And then ‘hiser’, from the 1850s. That's not really gender-neutral, though; that is a portmanteau of his and her, and they also suggested ‘himer’ and ‘hesher’ along the same lines. I’m not a huge fan.
Another portmanteau is a ‘thon’, that and one; that's from 1858.
This one's a bit newer, it's from 1975.
LATER HZ: Spelled ‘ey’.
HZ: Not sure how to pronounce it - A? I? E? But it is also the Anglo-Saxon word for ‘egg’. So it could possibly get confusing, depending on what you're reading. And then in the 14th century, the letter ‘a’ was in use pretty much interchangeably with all of the pronouns - he, she, it, they, you could use ‘a’ instead. So that's pretty easy because that’s a single letter, very quick, it’s very adaptable, not that much to remember. Problem is that it's also the indefinite article, which is the sixth most commonly used word in the English language. So I think it could be confusing for that to catch on.
But I do think something's going to, and a lot is happening in this area of language now and a lot more is going to happen in the next few years, so everything I've said tonight will seem very old-fashioned, which is why I'm touring the show this year. And, you know, you also have dominion in this, because our individual language use has power. And you might think, “I can't change the structure of society by myself,” and that's fair; we're just single human beings, and there's a lot of society. But through your use of language, you can reflect a version of the society that you want. So if it doesn't make sense to you to use gender job titles, get around it. If you think, “I don't want to have to choose between Mr, Miss and Mrs,” be a rabbi for the day. If that's a prosecutable thing. I don't want to be liable. But you get my gist.
It's a common theme for the Allusionist that it can be very validating to have a word for something. So if you have an idea, and then you have the vocabulary to describe that idea, that can really kind of will it into existence, you can coalesce it, you can give it permission to exist. Or if you have a medical problem and you get a term for it, that can be very empowering as well, because before you can think, “Oh, it's just me being a shit human,” and then you're like, “Oh no, it's actually a thing.” It can be a significant help to people to have terminology for things. So I was wondering whether you could flip that and whether it's possible to undo a concept by making gendered language ungendered. It's worth a try; it costs us nothing.
And you all know how powerful language is, right? Because if someone calls you a douchebag, or leaves the Zs out of your last name, it’s very hurtful.
MARTIN: Calls you Mr instead of Doctor - or even Miss instead of Doctor.
HZ: What could be worse?
MARTIN: Hang on - no, I literally can't think of anything.
HZ: And so if it's powerful to do that, then it has to be powerful also to be kind and productive and generous with language. And I know that I said that language changes as society changes, but I do think it can happen a little bit the other way around as well.
So what became of my bank card?
After that unintentionally life-changing visit to the bank, they mailed me a new card.
It said Mrs H Zaltzman.
I called them, I asked them to change it, they sent me another card: it said Miss H Zaltzman. I called them again; they sent another Mrs H Zaltzman card, so I had to call them up again - and even though I was sick at this point of the bank’s hold music, I wasn’t going to give up and just go with Mrs or Miss.
This trivial little thing had become the battleground for a more serious fight. And card after card, it went on for four months. Until one day, I was calling about yet another Mrs H Zaltzman card, andI was connected to someone in the call centre named Sue. And I explained to Sue the predicament, feeling sheepish because that’s how I roll when I’m trying to make a stand. And Sue just said, “Oh, yeah, that’s fine, I can sort that.”
Even though the bank had told me I had to have a title on the card; even though they said that without one, a man might steal my money; even though, without one, society might crumble into a gender-confused soup, thanks to Sue, three to five working days later, I received a bank card that just said ‘Helen Zaltzman’.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
catoptric, adjective, physics: of or relating to a mirror or reflection.
No Title was written and performed by me and Martin Austwick, who also composed and played the music. You can find more of his songs at palebirdmusic.com. Richard Zaltzman was played by Richard Zaltzman.
Thanks to the Blueberry Hill Duck Room in St Louis, Missouri, for having us and Dan Strickland, who recorded the audio there; Martin Austwick organised our live tours, with Josh Lindgren and Yuni Sher from CAA for the North American leg, Jess O’Callaghan at Audiocraft for the shows in Australia; our New Zealand shows happened thanks to Claire Mabey and Andrew Laking at Pirate and Queen, Rachael King at WORD Christchurch, Gary Barker at the Auckland Theatre Company, and Zoe Jeyes at the London Podcast Festival begat our London show.
As I said earlier, if you want visuals or the transcript, that's at theallusionist.org/notitle. There are also links to some of the research materials I used, and I am particularly grateful to Ben Zimmer, through whose post on VisualThesaurus.com I learned some invaluable things about Ms. Also thanks to Velvet Dibley for research and Rachele De Felice.
You can find me @allusionistshow on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. And you can hear every episode of the Allusionist, including the special soothing Tranquillusionist episodes, you can read the transcripts, you can see the full dictionary entry for each randomly selected word, and if I’m ever doing events again you’ll find listings, all at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
dictionary drop photo by Baranduin Briggs
