C

CHIVALRY

Chivalry is dead, but you’re still kinda cute.

– Nelly Furtado, Promiscuous (2006)

Chivalry. Not one of feminism’s most pressing issues, but definitely one of its more genteel debates.

Do you, as an attractive female who also happens to be a feminist, deign to take the seat that dude offers you on the crowded tube or laugh hollowly and stick your head back in your neighbour’s armpit? Is chivalry OK?

Personally, my view on this debate is always affected by the point that 99% of the men I’ve met who talk about chivalry with misty-eyed fervour are also the kind of Nice Guys who Really Aren’t Very Nice At All.

But that’s not for here.

What I am interested in is looking at its complex linguistic heritage.

Horses

What’s that sound in the distance?

Why, it’s the sound of clopping hooves – and chivalry‘s etymological root come to join us. Neiiigh.

Animal instincts. Photo by Hodge.

For though chivalry in English means (first definition ahoy!)  ‘the code of behaviour demonstrated by a perfect knight‘, were we French we’d replace ‘knight’ with ‘chevalier‘, or ‘horseman’ – from the root word cheval (= ‘horse’).

The knight, or chevalier, is in origin a nobleman on horseback who goes around rescuing maidens and fighting dragons. He is chivalrous in behaviour, displaying (the word’s second definition) ‘courage, honour, justice and readiness to help the weak’.

Key examples can be found in the legends of King Arthur and his horsebacked Knights of the Round Table – in particular Sir Gawain and the so-good-he-couldn’t-be-gooder Sir Percival (who later becomes Wagner’s Parsifal).

The chivalrous are those on horseback.

But it’s the secondary meaning of chivalry that we best recognise today: ‘courteous behaviour, especially towards women’ (that is, giving up your seat on the tube, which Percival would totally have done if he didn’t travel everywhere by cheval).

Courtly-powered lovin’

Chivalry – and the courtesy that defines it – is also the base idea behind courtly love, which the devoted may remember we addressed separately in the Alphabet Glory Days.

Charles I – Equestrian portrait by Anthony van Dyck

This is what the knights are doing when they’re not out fighting –  sighing for love among rose bushes, swooning at the touch of a ‘lily-white hand’ and definitely giving up their seats for a woman on the medieval commute.

And it was said to have been invented by a woman, Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Before she married Henry II and brought her French customs over to England, Eleanor had a period presiding alone over a predominantly male grouping in Poitiers.It seems inventing an elaborate code of chaste devotion to a single lady – courteous behaviour, if you will – was a good way for Eleanor to bring these bored and potentially restless knights into order – and, I assume, to block potential sexual aggression at the same time (cf. the court of Elizabeth I, which saw a resurgence of ‘courtly’ devotion to ‘Gloriana’, the ‘Virgin Queen‘).

Courtship

With these courtly roots, it’s appropriate that, during the English Civil War, the word chevalier should lend itself so enthusiastically to the Royalist cause in fighting for king (and court).

In this context, the Cavaliers were enemies to the Roundheads and cousins to chevaliers via the Latin source-word ‘cabellarius’ (also meaning ‘horseman’).

The origin of this term is actually pre-war, in the grouping of courtly ‘cavaliers’ at the original Carolingian court (a bit like the courtly lovers at Poitiers).

These included the ‘Cavalier poets‘, a conglomerate of literary courtiers formed by the King himself, including Robert Herrick and Edmund Waller.

The term in this usage is ambiguous, though. On the one hand, cavalier was often used in allusion to the King’s refined (indeed ‘knightly’) sensibilities, which, incidentally, included a famous love of horses – as the many magnificent equestrian portraits of him attest.

But, in a pejorative sense, the cavalier poets were so named because they were famously ‘roistering gallants’ and ‘libertines’. This is cavalier‘s other meaning: ‘haughty, disdainful or supercilious’ or ‘offhand and unceremonious’ (a bit like wearing your hat at a ‘rakish’ angle).

So cavalier is almost a contraction in terms.

The Don

This is the very ambiguity we find in Mozart’s great libertine opera, Don Giovanni, written about 100 years later. The ‘Don’ is a nobleman and serial womaniser. He’s a standard-issue rake, in fact: we learn in the Catalogue Song that he’s seduced 1,003 women in Spain alone.

Sir Charles Grandison

He is throughout referred to in the Italian as a ‘cavalier’, understood (and, for us English-speakers, translated) according to context variously as ‘gentleman’ (nobleman on horseback) and ‘rake’ (careless womaniser) – as in the opera’s subtitle, ‘Il dissoluto punito’ (‘the debauchee punished’).

Thus, when Don Giovanni takes the pretty peasant girl Zerlina away from her finance, Masetto, to show her his castle (no, really), Don Giovanni ‘reassures’ the jealous Masetto by saying he needn’t worry – his fiancee is ‘in the hands of a cavalier‘.Unfortunately, that’s exactly what Masetto is afraid of. “Let the cavaliere make a cavaliera out of you!” he trumpets at the departing Zerlina – he knows what’s going down (this).

Court to City

Back to English climes.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Queen Anne halved the size of the English court and moved it out of central London.

In so doing, she ultimately ended up transferring power from court to city – and courtesy became civility (from the Latin cives (= the city)).

The White Knight accompanies Alice through the forest

This is the age of opening doors, watching your language and standing up when a woman enters the room. Chivalry has gone domestic; men are civil now in Britain. Only the hot-headed Italian Don Giovannis are still cavaliers.

But when Samuel Richardson wanted to depict a perfect (but domestic) Englishman, he still made him an aristocratic knight (Sir Charles Grandison). Jane Austen did too: her paragon of virtue (himself based on Sir Charles), is pointedly named Mr Knightly (Emma).By this point it’s faded away to a name rather than a title, but the gentleman still has a vestigial horse (if you will).

White Knights

Strangely enough, the vestigial horse becomes more literal in the modern age, in the form of the ladies’ proverbial ‘ideal man’ – a chivalrous gentleman. Mr Right is also a ‘knight in shining armour’.

He’s even a  Lewis Carroll-esque ‘White Knight’, a noble rescuer (as in the song ‘My White Knight’ from Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man, where the knight in question will, her mother thinks, ‘save’ Marian the Librarian from Old Maidery).

Remember when Grace first meets Leo – the Great Romance – in Will and Grace? He’s on a horse in Central Park. That’s how you know he’s a Big Deal Romance.

Never trust a man on horseback

And, to conclude very crudely, I suppose this is what happened to chivalry .

It became the polite behaviour of the  gentleman – enshrined in tradition and developed over a couple of hundred years to become our friend offering me a seat on the bustling 21st century commute and sitcom single girls dreaming of their ‘Mr Darcy’.

But I still hear the sound of clopping hooves. The fantasy may be more Sir Gawain than Don Giovanni, but you know what they say – the apple never falls far from the lexical tree.

• For more from the Alphabet of Feminism – a whole series of posts about language, gender and history – visit the Alphabet category. Contains lots of hand-drawn illustrations!

I’m also a bit of an amateur linguist; I look at the language people use and what it means to use it in different circumstances for no other reason than it interests me. I’ve been considering a discussion on the language of gaming with BadRep for some time now, and I think this would be a good first topic: the problem with ‘girl gamer’ as an identifier.

Obviously, everyone is welcome to self-describe however they see fit, but I’d just like it if people could think about this term a little bit before applying it to themselves or others.

Let’s think about ‘gamer’. We all recognise this as meaning ‘someone who plays games’ with the extended connotation nowadays that this means computer- & video-games (as opposed to card games or board games). There’s no other extended definition: it’s not exclusive to male players. A gamer is just a person.

Now: ‘girl’. I have a serious problem with the general use of this word when referring to adults, anyway. A girl or a boy is a child. Use of either when speaking of an adult is insulting, infantilising and diminutive. (I won’t even use the words boyfriend or girlfriend if I can avoid them). The problem with coupling ‘girl’ with ‘gamer’ is that it accentuates the misconception that the gamer in question isn’t mature enough or capable enough to play with the adults – thereby widening the void between male and female gamers and adding to the sexism that some experience.

~Insert disclaimer on how we all know that not all gamers are sexist. Furthermore, it’s not just male gamers who are sexist in gaming either.~

Using ‘girl gamer’ on one’s self and others is just adding fuel to the sexist contingent’s fire, because it’s a way of self-segregating, and not a very positive way at that. We rarely hear of other segregated terms – you don’t nearly as often see references to black gamers, white gamers, asian gamers, boy gamers, gay gamers, intergalactic invader gamers – at least, not in the same way. So why should we encourage the use of ‘girl gamer’ if at the same time we’re trying to fight against being segregated based on sex or gender?

Sure, if we’re actually talking about children, then by all means use ‘girl’, as long as we’re willing to use ‘boy’ alongside it. In the adult world, however, self-referral as a ‘girl’ plays into the patriarchal control mechanisms of English, which then eke their way into the gamer consciousness. Unfortunately, as English-speakers, we get to speak a very sexist language, historically used by the powerful to subjugate and cling to power. In the past, those powerful people have primarily been male, so there’s no surprise that the language of the realm has been adapted to keep others out of power and quash protest.

You can see this simply in the way people talk without even touching on gamers and gaming. How many times have you heard someone refer to male and female adults as ‘guys’ and ‘girls’? ‘Guy’ is widely accepted as referencing an adult man, whereas ‘girl’ is a word for a child, and puts the women in the inferior position.

Language is important and so is the use of language. Any linguist will tell you that, regardless of their sex or gender. If you pause to think about it, anybody can realise how important language is. The words we choose to use are always vital to building the way we want to describe, discuss, identify and progress. ‘Girl gamer’ is problematic. It’s used as a derogatory term by some in the community to imply that female gamers are separate and inept, and that they should be kept that way. Attempts at reclamation of the term are fraught with complications as no matter how positive the intention, it still perpetuates this segregation, infatilisation and dismissal from the realm of The Gamer.

We need to remember that within gaming, it’s the game that matters. Games are forms of escapism, so why should anything about us personally be important when we’re gaming? Yes, our identities come into play when we discuss development and progression of our preferred art form/entertainment source, but when we’re playing, they’re irrelevant. You don’t need to be male, female, trans*, gay, straight, bi, queer, old, young, white, black or anything else; when you game, you are a gamer. Anyone can game, and we have the potential to create and mould a fantastically inclusive community to wrap around our favourite hobby – we just need to take care with how we define ourselves and the language we use.

We are all gamers.That’s it.

Repeat readers of my contributions will know that when we’re dealing with things that could potentially be spoilered, I tend to engage vagaries and nonspecifics to try and save people the pain.  This won’t be any different, but just in case, here it is:

THE SPOILER WARNING.

There.

Boobs

Overall, Nolan hasn’t done too badly.  Anne Hathaway seems a good choice, and there isn’t any in-yer-face cleavage or suspicious anti-gravity trickery.

Unlike in Arkham City.

+1 to Dark Knight Rises

Though she did have some cool moves, those boobs never seemed affected by the basic laws of physics.

Bums

Catwoman does have a black, skintight suit, but so does Batman – some compensation, I guess? – and there are only a couple of unfortunate shots of her bum as she rides the bat-bike.  This is however; a) a big improvement on Arkham City‘s near constant sexy-butt-wiggling right in centre-camera, and b) offset by her being awesome on that bike.

+0.5 to Dark Knight Rises

Backstory

It’s important to remember that the game and the film encounter Selina/Catwoman at different points in her story and her relationship with Bruce/the Bat.  Despite this, both mediums do quite well in demonstrating her motivations and character.  The film, however, does marginally better as it manages to do this while advancing, generally, a bit more respectful portrayal of her as a woman.

+0.5 to Dark Knight Rises

Bitch

The most disappointing Catwoman scene of the whole thing. “You dumb bitch!” snarls the guy she’s fighting.“No-one’s ever accused me of being dumb before,” says she. Now, Selina ignoring the b-word could either be a) because she’s showing that its intended purpose (as an insult) doesn’t affect her, therefore suck it, or b) it’s such a commonplace piece of vocabulary she doesn’t see why it’s so excruciatingly wrong. I hope, and like to believe (based on Hathaway’s facial expression on-screen), that it’s the former.  I was midway through writing this at the time, so I’m extremely disappointed it was there at all.  Seeing as we’re comparing the movie to the game, however, having one instance of “bitch” in the whole film is 1000x better than hearing it every other second, like you do in Arkham City.

+0.5 to Dark Knight Rises

Boots

YES THEY’RE TOTALLY PRACTICAL.

Also in that “bitch” scene is the sudden appearance of Selina’s massive metal stilettos. Why?! No one can be that gymnastic in 5″ fucking heels. As you may note, this hacked me off considerably. The film tries to justify these ridiculous boots by having the inside of the heel sharpened like a serrated blade (check out the poster image, right) – but that seems to me like a poor token to try and throw off the fact they’re pure decoration and only there for prettifying Catwoman. She doesn’t need them! They aren’t practical, even if there’s a Swiss Army Knife in those heels, it’s just… no.

The second attempt to validate them comes as a baddie asks her if they hurt (implied: to walk in) to which she responds, “I don’t know, do they?” and kicks him with one. Fun retort, maybe, but they’re still unnecessary, and all the credibility the film gained by not focussing on her boobs is lost as they just use those heels to return her to unrealistic pin-up status. Game-Catwoman has similarly stupid shoes so there’s no betterment to be found here.

+0 to Dark Knight Rises

To sum up…

Nolan & Hathaway’s Catwoman does better than Arkham City‘s, but there remains a lot of space to improve.  The age-old issue of practical footwear is the big one for me –  after making such an effort to cover up cleavage, making the top half of her outfit much more practical, what exactly was the point in contradicting that by forcing her to don stilettos?

The ‘bitch’ thing also irked me quite a lot, but it was much better than in Arkham City, which was almost unplayable in places for the amount of churning rage brought about by being called a Catbitch so often (I mean, aside from the fact a female cat can be called a ‘molly’, ‘queen’ or ‘dam’ where a bitch is a female canine, of course).

Film Catwoman has the common sense to tuck the boobs away so they don’t lollop around as she beats up baddies

As I said, film-Catwoman’s body isn’t made nearly as much of a focal point as it is in the game.  There’s no cleavage to ogle, lots of close-ups on her face, and when her body is in view, it’s often as hidden as Batman’s is by varying descriptions of black attire.  Downfall is a bit a of bum-shot while she’s on the batbike, but this is nowhere near as big a negative point as Catwoman’s near-constant sexy wiggling in Arkham City.¹

On the whole, film-Catwoman does much better than game-Catwoman for all the above reasons and many more I daren’t go into here for fear of lolspoilers.  The film on the whole is pretty awesome, and the female characters are integral to the story: despite what the trailers may suggest, it is not simply Bat vs. Bane with a bit of eye candy on the side.  I won’t say more because that’ll give too much away, but go see it and decide for yourselves.  I enjoyed it immensely and will probably be seeing it again in the not-too-distant future.

1. NB: Yes, I know about the portrayal of Catwoman in many of the comics and blah blah fidelity, but this is the 21st century, not 1940… so, surely, we can update her just a little to move with the times after 70+ years?  And I don’t mean revealing more skin.

The puerile association between a woman’s choice of tattoo placement and her sexual availability. AKA the Tramp Stamp. I hate that word. I hate it as a woman who has many tattoos and is bored rigid of all the shitty comments from the Morally Uptight Brigade about how ink looks “common” or “trashy” on women (and it’s almost always about women), how I’ll hate it when I get older, which is another dull reminder of how once we’ve lost our looks we’re for the bonfire of other people’s vanities.

But worse is the fact that tattoos, particularly this placement, have been added to the ever mounting list of Reasons Why Women Are Sluts. We marched for this, people!

A quick scroll around the internet reveals the extent of the problem. Over 2 million results on Google for the term “tramp stamp” alone. Top hit is the Wikipedia article which doesn’t even try to assert any form of anti-sexism editing beyond the coy reference to “lower back tattoo”, which I initially applauded until I saw the bare bottom shots used in the article. There are pages and pages devoted to deriding these tattoos, and the women who have them. So far, so bad.

The litmus test is whether the chaps get tarred with the same brush. Seems not. They may well have tattoos in this place (it’s a good bit of skin to get inked) but they’re apparently doing it for the irony factor. Or, poor thing, by accident.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not denying that some of these tattoos are ugly, silly or plain ridiculous. I’m very fussy about my tattoos and I love each one to bits almost as much as I love bitching about crap ones. Tattoos are a matter of personal taste, not a flag declaring whether or not I want to sleep with you: if you pour scorn and sexist drivel on my ink, then I definitely don’t.

Tramp stamp – another phrase that we can probably do without. Agreed?

I think it’s BRILLIANT.

Sarah C lent me How To Be A Woman, Caitlin Moran’s recent feminism handbook/memoir, and I expected to like it. I follow Moran on twitter where she’s always deeply funny, and I thought this would be an enjoyable read even if it’s just her personal take on the issues. What surprised me is how incredibly effective the book is – and how it does some things which are amazing from a male point of view.

Of course, cis male points of view aren’t automatically important in feminism (with some arguing that they have no place in it at all). When it comes to deciding what women want their future to be, and what they feel is harmful or unacceptable to that, men don’t really need to be part of the process. And most male feminists that I know understand that.

However, when it comes to implementing feminism against the status quo of patriarchal bullshit, when women are fighting for their rights from one direction it helps if men are on board too. If men feel threatened by coming changes, they’re more likely to do the kind of heinous, disgusting, and frequently violent things that we see thrown back at women who challenge anything the patriarchy is currently comfortable with.

Which is why I think that Caitlin Moran’s book should be compulsory reading for boys.

Photo of Caitlin Moran by Chris Floyd, which won August's "Portrait of the month" at the National Portrait Gallery. Source: http://www.npg.org.uk/

Moran does two things which are absolutely crucial. She actively calls bullshit on the many forms of misogyny which have somehow become acceptable in society, and then she laughs at them.

Calling bullshit is not a small thing. It takes incredible strength to say “no” to Hollywood, magazines, posters, tv and the expectations of your friends, family, colleagues and boss. By being brutally honest about becoming a woman – periods, body hair, boobs, everything about a teenager’s brain – she humanises it and makes it possible to go against expectations. Of COURSE the idea that every single woman needs a Brazilian shave by default is stupid bullshit. Step back a moment and compare it to real life as she does, and it becomes easy to laugh… and more importantly to finish laughing and shout HELL NO.

Boys will read this. They want to know what girls think, and what the changes happening to girls’ bodies and minds are actually like. The book is full of comedy but also danger, which keeps it exciting and holds your attention. I’m always going on about how pop culture is great because it engages people and slips messages past them while they’re having fun – this does exactly that, really well.

Importantly, when talking to the male side of the equation, it also demystifies. Male readers can look at the stupidity of some conventions, see what the reality is for women and it will become easier for them to realise where the bullshit lies.

Moran speaks directly to men in the book as well as women. After telling female readers to say the words “I am a feminist” out loud, possibly while standing on a chair (“Say it. SAY IT. SAY IT NOW! Because if you can’t, you’re basically bending over saying ‘Kick my arse and take my vote, please, the patriarchy.’“) she adds this:

“And do not think you shouldn’t be standing on that chair, shouting ‘I AM A FEMINIST!’ if you are a boy. A male feminist is one of the most glorious end-products of evolution. A male feminist should ABSOLUTELY be on the chair – so we ladies may all toast you, in champagne, before coveting your body wildly.”

Note to men: this is relatively true. Identifying as a feminist in actions as well as words (unless you’re a lying weasel who is just doing it to get into their knickers) will by itself put you quite far into the “not a raging asshole” category. That’s hot. I’m just saying.

I agree with Sarah on the minor disappointments. The author’s use of “retard” on page 5 really jars and stands out, just plain doesn’t work, and isn’t okay. Where Sarah found it limiting that the events are focused only on Moran’s personal experiences, though, I didn’t think this mattered as much to the message. Where Caitlin says she doesn’t feel that the word “boobs” really describes any part of her body (and “breasts” is worse), I know some women who feel comfortable with that word – but her final decision doesn’t seem as crucial as long as the reader is made aware that girls face the situation of having to find the right words for themselves. Making everyone ask themselves the question means the answer she chooses almost doesn’t matter.

There are plenty of universal truths in there. The chapter where she reveals how the word “fat” has basically become weaponised to a greater degree than previous nuclear-level playground insults, and gives examples, all rings totally true. The stories of her 16-year-old self veer between amusing and devastating, but it just helps the reader identify with the general problem. Hell, it made *me* identify with it, when my 16-year-old self was dangerously underweight, gangly, six-foot and male.

And that’s the secret. The reason I’m excited about this book is that it’s the first one I think will be hugely effective, to women but especially to the average man. There are many modes of communication which just don’t work: language is important, but I think we can frequently become so removed from daily discourse in our attempts to avoid discriminatory words that we lose the audience entirely. Caitlin Moran will change male attitudes a million times more powerfully than, say, a paper by feminist academics which would only be read by feminist academics, containing newly invented language that boys barely understand and have not been convinced they need.

You can tell whether some misogynistic societal pressure is being exerted on women by calmly enquiring, “And are the *men* doing this, as well?” If they aren’t, chances are you’re dealing with what we strident feminists refer to as “some total fucking bullshit”.

How to be a woman engages the reader with great humour and truth, says things of interest, and is entertaining enough to do the pop-culture stealth-feminism thing. The early reaction from feminists was “This is an important book!”, but the opinions then swayed back and forth a bit afterwards. I think “important” is precisely the right word, because it’s going to work.

Teenage boys! Want to know about teenage girls? Read this book. Men! Want to read something that’s genuinely hilarious and interesting, even if you don’t ‘do’ feminism? Read this book. It’s angry without being exclusionary, very funny, very honest, and has a real shot at inspiring a new generation to become feminists.

Top marks, Moran.

Which is high praise as these days, as I usually balk at the price of books when they can be gotten for free from your local library – and indeed should be for the most part, because otherwise those fools in power will try to close them.

Torygeddon aside, I’ve recently been really happy with the “new” (over the past ten or so years; they aren’t appearing like the rash of teenage vampire novels) books about feminism – like Living Dolls by Natasha Walter. Angry books, clever books, often books by young women. But at the same time I did get a little turned off by them – they were also difficult books, thoughful, smart books that needed full your full attention and dealt with very big, very important feminist issues in very serious ways. After which you tend to feel sad, or angry and a bit frustrated.

Whilst there is certainly room and need for those books, there’s also a need for this book. Because this isn’t about the big stuff, not entirely. It’s about one woman and her journey through a very personal feminism. It’s about pants being annoyingly too small, fashion, eating too much cheese, having a crap dog, rowing with your family and the general business of living. It’s pop-feminism, and we at BadRep are all behind that – the kind of feminism that is easy to access, relevant and doesn’t require you to have digested a thesaurus or the entire works of Helene Cixous in the original french. It’s a “normal” book, and normalising feminism is something I am all for. It does cover some “serious feminist” topics – such as abortion (covered in more detail in a review by Abortion Rights over here), having children, not having children, prostitution, rape, sexism in all its many forms. But you never feel preached at, or patronised.

So, what’s it like to read? Well, it’s a bit like being in the pub with our Editor, Miranda, when she’s had a couple of ciders and is “holding forth”. Certainly as far as goes the excessive use of CAPS LOCK AND EXCLAMATION POINTS TO MAKE THINGS STAND OUT!!!¹ To call it “friendly and personal” sounds a bit pat and cliched, but it is. The book takes the form of an autobiography of growing up – poor and in Wolverhampton – and dealing with the challenges of becoming a woman. It’s deeply refreshing to find some non-university educated, working class feminism. Feminism that doesn’t rely heavily on theory. Feminism that makes me laugh, and read sections out to my flatmate so we can both spew milk from our noses. It’s a book that’s easy and fun (yes, feminism can be fun!) to read, and I devoured it in a few hours.

I recommend it, naturally. But I also offer a few caveats. There were a couple of points that I didn’t like, and they came from the same place as the stuff I did like. You see, when you write informally, personally and from the heart, you also tend to be a bit less careful than you might with word use. And sloppy language is very perilous when you are criticising sexism, which is also about sloppy language, in part. The word “retarded” for example, is used a couple of times, to describe being like someone with a learning disability. This is not cool. It’s a word that we should all stop using (much like “n*gger”). There is no reclaiming this word. End of.

I also found myself getting a bit twitchy with some of her assumptions – and again, these were down to the personal, anecdotal approach. Her feminism is not exactly my feminism. I do not believe, for example, that women are quite so biologically constrained that cystitis is the reason we didn’t found empires. I found the focus in on the experience of living in a cisgender woman’s body and the assumption of “natural” consequences to this a bit disarming. But then, my teenage years were not hers. My growing pains were different.

It is a brave book. It doesn’t pull any punches, and there will be bits that you disagree with. But that’s part of the point of polemics; they stand their ground, pitbull-like, and assert a view. The ensuing debate carries them forward. And the jokes. Still cleaning milk off my t-shirt over the high-heeled shoe bit.

1. “Oh GOD, guilty as charged” – Ed

Y

YES

and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

– James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

She asked for one more dance and I’m
Like yeah, how the hell am I supposed to leave? […]
Next thing I knew she was all up on me screaming:
Yeah, Yeah yeah, Yeah yeah, Yeaah
Yeah, Yeah yeah, Yeah yeah, Yeaah

– Usher, ‘Yeah’ (2004)

YES! Have finally managed a pretentious appropriation of pop culture as an epigram. Ludacris fill cups like double-Ds.

yes i will yes

Ahem. Yes is the last of our Old English words. It’s gise or gese, meaning ‘so be it’, perhaps from gea, ge (= ‘so’), plus si (=’be it!’), the third person imperative of beon (= ‘to be’). In this form, yes was stronger than its Germanic cognate, yea (much like today) and, apparently, was often used in Shakespeare as an answer to negative questions. We could do with one of them nowadays, no? How many times have you answered a question with yes when you mean no? (‘Doesn’t she….?’ ‘…Yes, she doesn’t’).

The penultimate word in our Alphabet, yes is frequently one of the first words we learn on earth; its meaning is clear and unequivocal, by turns disastrous, passionate, exhilarating, loaded and humdrum – but always positive in the full sense of that word. It is almost invariably repeated, as in Joyce (and Usher) – ‘yes I will, Yes’, the successive affirmations underlining and confirming the first – just like a signature under your printed name, if you listen to Derrida

Sure ‘Nuff n’ Yes I Do

James ‘Awesome Glasses‘ Joyce apparently made much of his novel ‘novel’ Ulysses ending on this, which he considered ‘the female word’. The final chapter, ‘Penelope’, often also referred to as ‘Molly Bloom’s soliloquy’, is 42 pages of just eight sentences, wherein Molly, wife of Leopold Bloom, muses to herself in bed.

For those who have better things to do than wrestle with a modernist doorstop, as the wife of the novel’s ‘Ulysses’, Molly is a counterpart to ‘Penelope‘, wife of Odysseus / Ulysses and conventional model of marital fidelity. The similarity expires fairly quickly, since Joyce’s Penelope is having an affair with ‘Blazes Boylan’, but nonetheless her chapter is often named after Ulysses’ wife. It begins and ends with this yes, and in a letter to Frank Budgen, Joyce explained that ‘Penelope’ rotates around what he considered the four cardinal points of the female  body – ‘breasts, arse, womb and cunt’ – expressed respectively by the words because, bottom, woman and yes. Some of the comparisons are clear – the womb has long been seen as synonymous with ‘woman’ (however reductively); bottom / arse – ok; because / breasts… um?; yes / cunt – hmm.

I suspect this last pairing has a lot to do with the affirmation of sex: interaction with this organ should be one preceded by yes and punctuated with repetitions of this confirmation (yes yes yes). (Why James Joyce, you filthy…). We see a similar thing in Usher (first time for everything): the repeated yeah, yeah, yeah is a sexual affirmation – ‘How the hell am I supposed to leave??‘. This is about a female seduction (‘she’s saying “come get me”!’), but one that we suspect will not end in when-i’m-sixty-four style knitting by the fire. For one thing, we learn that Usher already has a ‘girl‘, who happens to be ‘the best of homies’ with this club seductress; for another, Ludacris announces they will leave after a couple of drinks because they ‘want a lady in the street but a freak in the bed’. So actually, the art of being a lady lies in effectively concealing a consent that, in private, becomes loud, repeated and unstoppable.

Yes Indeed

Coming my way? The 'Easy Girlfriend' Poster, 1943-4

This is a well-trodden path, and all part of the old idea of how consent given too easily (yes yes yes) – or, in some cases, even given at all – is liable to get females into trouble. A less well-trodden example is Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753), which devotes several hundred of its thousand or so pages to what happens after the protagonist has proposed to his fiance: though she has accepted the proposal, she fears that to ‘name the day’ herself – or even to consent to a ‘day’ suggested to her – would be to show a forwardness disturbing in a woman. Disturbing perhaps, but probably a relief to the exhausted reader, for she manages to suspend her final consent to ‘thursday a month hence’ for an entire blushing, confused volume of this hefty tome.

We can go further back, of course: in Shakespeare-times, Juliet fears Romeo will think she is ‘too quickly won’. To correct this, she offers to ‘frown, and be perverse, and say thee nay‘ (no no yes), artificially constructing a well-won consent where positive affirmation already exists (history does not record whether or not Juliet was ‘a freak in the bed’). Many would-be Romeos have seized on such fears to assume (or convince themselves) that this is just what their ladies are doing when they give an unequivocal ‘no’, so seduction narratives are littered with lovers assuming their lovers really mean yes when they reply in the negative – examples have spanned Austen’s Mr Collins to modern day Mills & Boon. Apparently, in the latter case, one is supposed to find this irresistible.

Go No More A-Roving

We’re teetering around something rather insidious here, and one aspect of this finds its expression in a 1940s propaganda poster. The ‘Easy Girlfriend’ anti-VD advert placed the blame for the Second World War venereal epidemic squarely with the momento-mori type be-hatted skull (a sexually experienced re-appropriation of the medieval Death and the Maiden trope). ‘The “easy” girlfriend spreads syphilis and gonorrhea’, it blazed – she who says yes too easily is to be shunned by polite society, and will be – naturellement – riddled with disease. Of course, syphilis’ original spread throughout Europe had followed the path of the Grand Tour, but this must have been because Venetian prostitutes were taking expensive package holidays throughout France, Spain, Rome, Switzerland and Turkey, mustn’t it, Lord Byron?

So while you probably disagree with Joyce’s view that yes is an intrinsically female word, it’s certainly one whose utterance is littered with potential problems for women. Yes means yes.

NEXT WEEK: the Alphabet returns for its final installment – Z is for Zone

U

UTERUS

There are some letters in the dictionary that are more Latinate than others. In consequence, u, v and, to an extent, o are largely dominated by medical terminology (because doctors, bless ’em, love a bit of Caecilius est in horto).

In Utero

Sexy tudors. Henry VIII, after Holbein.

Uterus derives from a Latin homonym meaning ‘womb’ or ‘belly’, with reference to the proto-Indo European udero (= ‘abdomen’), and, possibly, a Slavic usage, vedro, meaning ‘bucket’. Much like the ‘bucket’ (and indeed the shape of the letter u with which the word commences), the first sense of uterus is as a vessel – ‘the organ in which the young are conceived, developed and protected till birth; the female organ of gestation; the womb’.

Much has been made of this ‘protective’ element – it has been frequently observed that the ‘fetal’ position babies adopt to fill the uterus endures into adulthood as a comforting or even instinctual reaction to anxiety, pain, distress or cold – a kind of retrospective communion with the mother’s body. This sort of thing, it seems, is not above a bit of marketing, and the uterus is often invoked as a place of calm, darkness and peace.

Opposed to this, we have the sort of ambiguity nowhere better demonstrated than through tanks. (yes, tanks). The Mark I tank, the world’s first combat tank, was renamed from ‘Big Willie’ to ‘Mother’ (…), and its successors were colloquially dubbed ‘Mother’ throughout both world wars. The reasons are obvious: the inside of a tank is small, hot and protective. Childlike, a crew could be forgiven for considering themselves invincible within it – yet once the fuel tank is hit, the men inside suffer a hideous, incestuous death, incinerated by their own machine. This sort of thing runs right the way through conceptions of the mother’s body, particularly in psychoanalysis, which is never tired of exposing the deeply conflictual nature of many mother-child relationships, and with mapping those onto the cisgendered female body – we might think particularly of Melanie Klein’s famous ‘good breast’ and ‘bad breast’. If we’re going there.

HOWEVER. BACK TO THE RENAISSANCE. In its early incarnations in English this ‘womb’ is rarely so clearly gendered (as you may remember, King Lear thinks he has one), and, true to its ambiguous etymology, early modern minds frequently considered the uterus to be a generic bodily pouch. Thus it was often conflated with the gender-neutral belly (ah, Isidore of Seville), and in this form it was thought to be proof of the body’s retentive faculties. So even when considered as a specifically reproductive organ, the thinking went, the uterus still resembles the digestive system in how long it takes to do its business, since it creates infants over a leisurely period of nine months. While I doubt it takes quite that long for your morning Alpen, digestion is certainly something of a gradual process – consider, if you will, the hangover.

Horn of Plenty

If you remember the Alphabet post on ovary (to which this is in many ways a companion), you may also remember that until the seventeenth century sex organs were considered to have analogues across the genders (penis = vagina, labia = foreskin and uterus = scrotum). Along with its reproductive and sack-like qualities – I am reminded of the beautifully named ‘Mermaid’s Purses‘ – in this model the uterus also matches the scrotum in its creative properties. After all, reproduction is six of one and half-a-dozen of the other.

But this was not just something tossed around in the Renaissance lab and subsequently ignored: the scrotum-uterus comparison actually spread into what we might consider a bizarre arena – fashion. I am, of course, talking about the codpiece, ‘a bagged appendage to the front of the breeches; often conspicuous’. This was a sartorial fave of Henry VIII (above, right), who clearly took his outfits very seriously – but I note that sexy Jonathan Rhys Meyers has avoided the sexy codpiece throughout the BBC’s Sexy Tudors. Too sexy?

Originally a modesty device to get round the, ahem, ‘shortcomings’ of the hose, this strange appendage quickly grew to a size that redefined it as a disturbing kind of hyper-masculine power-dressing. Yet the word derives from the Old English codd (+ piece), which came to mean ‘testicles’ in early Medieval times (quite possibly because of exactly this phenomenon) but originally meant simply ‘a bag, pouch or husk’. Indeed, the codpiece was frequently dubbed a belly, and, through fun with synonyms, the womb could become a cod: my good friend Thomas Laqueur highlights the Pardoner’s exclamation ‘O wombe! O bely! O stynkyng cod!’, in the Canterbury Tales, and also points out that the codpiece quickly started to resemble…(I like this bit)… ‘a finely embroidered and bejewelled horn of plenty’.

Horn.

So it seems that, while Henry VII might not thank you for it, we could observe that this most macho of garments is in fact drawing attention to the womb-like, generative, and retentive properties of what lurks within (which, of course, it also helped protect – gender-ambiguous Russian dolls, anyone?). Indeed, glancing at a couple of examples in portraiture, a lot of these men look rather like they have an artificially constructed uterus poised over their genitalia (love how he’s pointing, just in case we miss it). Less Blackadder, more… actually, I don’t know what that is.

Bag for Life

But, of course, eventually someone had to seize on anatomical differences to posit a definition of gender, and thus it that (around 1615) the uterus started to be considered something exclusively female – as regular readers will be aware, this was a chain that began with independent naming of the organ in question and eventually reached the pitches of hysteria in the nineteenth century. There is also a strange quasi-legal term, uterine, apparently first spotted in the seventeenth century but not dictionary-cited until 1816, meaning ‘related through the mother’. Thus, ‘the property devolves to his brothers or uterine uncles’, with the body of the mother here serving a dynastic link, since all these uncles can be proved to have shared a uterus. They could even be half-brothers, since an alternative meaning for uterine is ‘having the same mother, but not the same father’. Working on a similar premise, if you are particularly toolish, and your sister has a son, you would (in pre-paternity test times) have been best off leaving your money to your nephew: his link to you is purely uterine, unlike your link to your son, who could be anyone’s spawn.

As we draw near the end of the Alphabet series, threads begin to resolve themselves. Uterus has been the final word of three (hysteria and ovary were the other two) all of which address the issue of mapping the cisgendered female body. Following the three, we have seen a model of sex and gender that does not conform with what many experience as the current status quo. Conversely, the distinction between genders does not seem to have been primarily based on the body until the nineteenth century (or even later). Thus, we have seen women turning into men with comparatively little contemporary comment, the female orgasm (and in some cases her entire sexual appetite) vanish from the everyday realities of heterosexual sex, and now, and perhaps most bizarrely, an epidemic of hyper-masculine men apparently walking around with giant uteri affixed over their genitalia. (Yes, I did just say ‘uteri’). Perhaps this is worth thinking about…

NEXT WEEK: V is for Vitriol

TEA

Make tea, child, said my kind mamma. Sit by me, love, and make tea.

Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (1747)

Ah, the Joke Post comes upon us at last. T is for ‘t’… very droll. I lift a cup to that. But fie! Have we learned nothing on this lexical journey? First and foremost, tea was not always pronounced as we currently say it: when it first appeared in English in 1601 it was ‘taaaaay‘ and often written tay (like the modern French thé, a bit). It is not quite clear when and why the shift to ‘ti’ happened, but, then, few things are as easy to lose sight of as pronunciation (how many people remember that Keats was a Cockney?)

Shall I be mother? Catherine of Braganza, painted by Jacob Huysmans.

Tea, of course, has the additional complication that it is not an English word (although what is?) – it came from the Dutch thee, in turn from Malay and, eventually, Chinese Amoy dialect: t’e, or the Mandarin ch’a. Woven into the geographical etymology, then, is a legacy of import history: around the mid-seventeenth century we procured our tea from the Dutch, who imported it from Malaysia and, ultimately, China. What exactly were they importing? Why, tea‘s first definition, of course: ‘the leaves of the tea-plant, usually in a dried and prepared state for making the drink’. In this form, tea began with a queen, and quickly became every eighteenth-century Cosmo girl’s first route of seduction.

Brew and Thunder.

But first – the drink. ‘Made by infusing these leaves in boiling water, having a somewhat bitter and aromatic flavour, and acting as a moderate stimulant’ – in this sense, the word tea is first recorded around 1601, so some trendsetters must have been aware of it before the widespread importing of the later seventeenth century, when tea really came into its own: Samuel Pepys tried it in 1660, and a couple of years later it found a celebrity backer in the be-farthingaled shape of the Portuguese queen consort to Charles II, Catherine of Braganza (remember her?). So, in England at least, tea was from the beginning tending towards the female of the species.

Catherine’s tea-drinking was partly to do with Portugal’s colonial links with Asia, but also with her temperament: solemn and pious, she initially had trouble fitting into the Protestant English court and her preference for a ‘moderate stimulant’ over the ales and beers otherwise drunk marked one of many departures. But tea was quickly owning its stimulating qualities and being marketed as a ‘tonic’, a civilized alternative to alcohol capable of soothing aches’n’pains and spurring on mental capacities: a zeitgeist for the intellectual impetus of the early Enlightenment – as against Charles II’s well-known debauchery – and, in fact, a ‘panacea‘:

Hail, Queen of Plants, Pride of Elysian Bow’rs!
How shall we speak thy complicated Powr’s?
Thou wondrous Panacea, to asswage
The Calentures of Youth’s fermenting rage,
And animate the freezing veins of age.

Nahum Tate, from Panacea: A Poem Upon Tea (1700)

But what started out as a Portuguese import became a matter of English national identity, and by the next century London’s East India Company had established a monopoly on trade, controlling imports into Britain (and thus, prices), using its extensive trade links with Queen Catherine’s dowry –then-Bombay – and the East Indies, and Asia. It was thus that the English turned not into a nation of coffee drinkers, but to devotees of the ‘Queen of Plants’. And a queen she certainly was, and not entirely distinct from the maternal and oft-secluded Queen Anne, who dramatically reduced the size of the English court and inspired a new fashion for calm domesticity and politeness. Thus, the bustling male-dominated coffee-houses, but also a more feminine fix at home…

Five Leaves Left.

So in 1738 tea came to mean not just some withered leaf, but also an opportunity for socialising! Hurrah! To be precise, tea became ‘a meal or social entertainment at which tea is served; especially an ordinary afternoon or evening meal, at which the usual beverage is tea’. The fact that it could connote an ‘ordinary afternoon meal’ made tea a convenient beverage to offer casual social callers, although it was also, of course, a beverage that demanded a whole host of conspicuous purchases: a full tea-set and the crucial Other Element – sugar. Thus your tea-table represented Britain’s colonial interests off in China and India to the tea-side, and Africa and the East Indies to the sugar-side, with all the attendant horrors of the emergent slave trade conveniently swept under the (Persian) rug.

Tea. Photo par Hodge.

The conspicuous consumption tea represented was exacerbated by its price: before mass importation in the mid-century had driven costs down, the leaf itself was fixed at so extortionate a price (a bargain in 1680 was 30s a pound) as to necessitate the purchase of a lockable tea-chest, which would become the responsibility first of the lady of the house, and, when age-appropriate, of her daughter. The woman who held the key to the tea-chest was, naturally, also the woman who made the tea – thus ‘Shall I be mother?’, a phrase of uncertain origin. One theory I came across was that it is a Victorian idiom related to the phenomenon of women unable to breastfeed naturally using teapot spouts to convey milk to their infant instead. OH THE SYMBOLISM.

Whatever the phrase’s specific origins, it’s certainly true that from tea‘s domestic beginnings onwards whole family power structures could hang on which woman this ‘mother’ was. Alas, London’s major galleries forbid image reproduction (WAAH), but if you turn to your handouts,  you will see this in action. This is the Tyers family: that’s Mr Tyers on the left, and his son just down from one of the universities. His daughter, on the far right, is about to be married (she’s putting her gloves on to go out – out of the door and out of the family). Her role as tea-maker has, in consequence, passed onto her younger sister, who now sits as squarely in the middle of the family portrait as she does in the family sphere. Conversely, in Clarissa, when the heroine angers her parents they sack her from her tea-task and grotesquely divide it up among other family members (“My heart was up at my mouth. I did not know what to do with myself”, she recalls, distraught. I WANTED TO MAKE TEA!).

And she feeds you tea and oranges…

Of course, while assigning the tea-making to your daughter could be a loving gesture of trust, it also pimped her marriageability: it requires a cool head and calm demeanour to remember five-plus milk’n’sugar preferences, judge the strength of the tea and pour it, all the while making small-talk and remaining attentive to your guests. Add to this the weighty responsibility of locking the tea away from thieving servants and you have the management skills of housewifery in miniature. It also showed off physical charms: poise, posture, the elegant turn of a wrist, a beautifully framed bosom. To take this momentarily out of the salon, no respectable punter would get down in an eighteenth-century brothel without first taking tea with the girls: Fanny Hill spends at least as much time drinking tea as (That’s enough – Ed), and, of course, this kind of performative tea-ritual femininity is a mainstay in the professional life of the Japanese geisha.

So, along with its identity as a colonial mainstay in Britain’s trading life, tea in its origins is also something specifically feminine: a kind of Muse inspiring intellectual greatness, a Queen to be worshipped as a symbol of Britain’s health and power, and a key element in the women’s domestic lives. It could be stimulating, relaxing and seductive, but, as would become disastrously clear, it was always political.

NEXT WEEK: U is for Uterus

SHIP

Q: Why are ships refered to in the female gender?

A: – The only beautiful lines to match a ship would be that of a beautiful woman.
– When we crusty mariners go to sea we want a way to honor our loved ones left on shore.
– Unless the grew is different they name them after girls. Besides they all have issues & a mind of there own. And cost a fortune to keep going.
– Because they are always wet at the bottom!
– Because the are grace full and slander also very majestic. Just like my woman.
– Because we love our boats like our women.
– Because they need handling very very carefully!

Yahoo Answers

OK, you got me. My finely-honed research techniques generally begin with asking Google. Believe it or not, this timeless question: ‘why is a ship called “she”?’ seems to have eluded people for quite a while – along with this Yahoo Answers page, I also consulted this tea-towel in a Greenwich gift-shop and asked my old friend, the dictionary. Nary a satisfactory (read: academic) answer. But let this not stop us – onwards!

Saucy Nancy takes a bath - illustration by John Harwood

We know ship is probably Old English (scip) but its ultimate etymology is officially ‘uncertain’. The Online Etymology Dictionary (whence I have had frequent recourse since my alma mater saw fit to strip me of my free OED online access) considers it to be proto-Germanic (skipen), ultimately from ‘skei‘ = ‘to cut, split’ – now, now, let’s not get bawdy in our quest for gendering answers, it’s easily explained as ‘a tree cut out’: Literal, man. This gives us its first meaning, as ‘a large sea-going vessel’, as opposed to a smaller boat. In modern times, this means specifically ‘a vessel having a bowsprit and three masts, each of which consists of a lower top and topgallant mast’.

These may not be specifically gendered, but by the 1550s people were widely referring to an unsailed ship as a maiden and its initial outing as a maiden voyage (an adjectival form of the proto-Germanic magadinom = ‘young womanhood; sexually inexperienced female’). Of course, this was a trend appropriated in the sky-crazy 1960s to apply to aircraft and other heavy vehicles, and it is still widely used today – with many of its superstitions intact (and possibly justified… don’t know if anyone’s heard of RMS Titanic at all?) The word also has figurative uses and associations: ‘ship of the desert‘, meaning ‘a camel’; and a ghostly ‘Guinea ship‘, which is a sailor’s term for a floating medusa.

I always say it’s the uniform Shirley’s fallin’ for…

Ah, sailors. Perhaps I’m generalizing here, but they have not been widely celebrated for their feminist views. Their superstitions on the other hand – well, those are another matter. Along with Fear Of Maiden Voyages, these also include the belief that having a woman on board was unlucky (the sea would get Angry and Wreak Revenge) and that if a bare-footed female crossed your path on your way to sea you should not get on board (let the lads scoff, you weren’t planning on dying anytime soon). Daughters of Eve were to be kept away from maiden ships in particular at all costs: barren women were simply dying to jump over the keel in the name of fertility, with nary a care for the lives of the carpenters and captain they were endangering in the process.

It's for warding off danger, sir, honest... Image via Flickr user r3v || cls

In fact, the closest a woman should ever come to a ship in Days of Yore was in the form of a bare-breasted apparition (get your tits out, love): such visions would calm gales and rough seas – although this one does rather sound like it was made up by a singularly hopeful sailor down the club of a saturday night – and they possibly explain why so many figureheads seem to have mislaid their t-shirts. What’s that you say? Figureheads? These are carved decorations sitting astride the prow, most common on ships between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries (eventually abandoned because they had grown to such a size that they impeded the vessel’s smooth progress). When they were not effigies of naked women, they generally had something to do with the name of the vessel in question, as with London’s replica of the Golden Hind (or indeed the Golden Behind, led by Captain Abdul and his pirate crew in another of my childhood favourites). Their function, then, could be to identify the ship, ward off supernatural danger or simply to look pretty, in a kind of early version of the pin-up page three – in most cases, they probably fulfilled a mixture of these services.

Their relationships with the sailors manning the vessel could vary: they were almost certainly endowed with some kind of spiritual protective power – we must not forget how perilous a sea voyage remained even into the twentieth century – but they were presumably also viewed with all the Manly Affection evidenced in respondents to Yahoo Answers. After all, there’s a reason a sailor has a girl in every port, and a comparative pendant might be that iconic pin-up image of Betty Grable marketed at American GIs in 1943 (or indeed the retro-appeal of Sexy Sailor underwear). The much-underrated XTC exploited this in their eighties-tastic music video for All You Pretty Girls (1984) (which contains the immortal line ‘in my dreams we are rocking in a similar motion’).

…He won’t look so la-di-dah in a suit of dungarees.

But an enjoyable analogue to this tradition is the tobacco-chewing, slang-spouting, landlubber-hating figurehead Saucy Nancy, friend to Worzel Gummidge in Barbara Euphan Todd’s Worzel Gummidge and Saucy Nancy (1947). She introduces herself to John and Susan saying ‘I’m half a lady because I ain’t got no lower half’ (Gummidge considers her a ‘sea-scarecrow’). True to her epithet (used here in saucy‘s first sense, ‘impertinent, rude’), she is also given to spouting vaguely inappropriate sea-shanties at inconvenient times, the most telling of which suggests a lot about the relationship between sailor and figurehead:

Nancy, Nancy, tickle me fancy,
Here we lift again –
Furling jib to a lifting sea
All together, and time by me
Or the girl in the stern my bride to be.

All this has been diversionary (and, mayhap diverting), but where did the ship go? Well, aside from the fact that the figurehead was in many cases working as a synecdoche for the ship itself, it also serves as an illustration of the relationship between the sailor crew and the vessel’s ‘human’ side (which is almost always gendered female).

Sail on, oh Ship of State

However, as of 1675, ship had a further meaning, in figurative ‘application to the state’, an idea that goes back to Plato and Horace as a model of good government. Plato reckoned that a ship, being a complicated technical beast, required a competent ‘philosopher king’ at the helm, to avoid in-fighting and silliness among the crew (which would, inevitably, end in naval disaster). The idea was picked up by Henry Longfellow (1807-1882), but appears elsewhere as a figurative commonplace.

It takes on a literal incarnation in modern times through flagship ocean liners, whose British incarnations are frequently feminized (Queen Mary 1 & 2, Queen Elizabeth 1 & 2). Here it is useful to compare the lexical-historical conception of queens and nannies – as the devoted will remember, the latter acquired a specifically feminine connotation with the fussy behaviour of a state.

So why is a ship gendered female? Well, aside from the sea-faring gender-assumptions (mermaids, bare-breasted apparitions, and perhaps even the traditional association of women and moisture), there is also the fact of seaborne sexual frustration and resultant kind of genial misogyny of what is arguably a proto-pinup tradition. Perhaps the reason I could find no conclusive answer to this question is that each ship is (traditionally) ‘manned’ by a consortium of sailors, all with different senses of humour.

NEXT WEEK: T is for Tea