Reading time: 4.40

1,110 words

Hey Reader,

Gossip. Spinster. Villain. Wench. Hussy. Knave. Mistress.

People with power redesignate the words of people without it.

Semantic pejoration is a fascinating phenomenon and one of my favourite examples is that of the spinster.

When I got married, I was noted as a “spinster of the parish” in the record book and was briefly outraged. Spinster. It does conjure up a certain crazy cat lady, a never-married old maid, living alone and bitter, spinning a web of terror to capture unsuspecting children or men, doesn’t it?

Because that’s the image presented through fairytales and storytelling and “history” as told to us by those with an agenda to push (i.e. wealthy male landowners).

But that’s not always been the case. In the middle ages, it was simply an ungendered term for someone who spun wool. It probably came to mean an unmarried woman who spun wool because it was one of the few trades available to unmarried women at the time. Married women tended to have access to higher-paying work — and married elite women often were active in the occupations of their husbands and sons.

Some women worked on their own, separate from their husbands, as skilled tradies.

And poor women worked in all kinds of trades, including labourers, hawkers and haggleers, and sex workers.

However, there were plenty of single women who made a good living from spinning and similar trades, and never needed to tether themselves to a man which is, I suspect, precisely why the term came to have negative connotations.

Because the idea that women don’t need men is terrifying to the patriarchy.

(If you’re interested in women’s roles in history — and you should be, because it’s fascinating — I can recommend reading The Oxford Handbook of Women & Gender in Medieval Europe and Singlewomen by Judith M Bennett.)

Gossip is another example I love (and I have to thank Sarah Chalmers Page who wrote about this on LinkedIn and sparked this article). Did you know its etymology is probably from godsibb, a person related to you spiritually? A godparent, perchance?

People who are close talk to each other. About other people. About the world. About ideas. Women especially, but also men. And one of the things women talk about is how to keep their loved ones safe.

As Sarah said, “The thing about your gossips is, they tell you stuff. Stuff like, ‘I hear your daughter is old enough to get a job as a maid, how did that happen? Anyway, do NOT let her work for the miller, not at any wages, he’s a monster, the baker pays worse but he’s a lovely man.’ And the church and gentry (and miller) hated that for us and they twisted the word to mean lies and mean stories.”

So “idle gossip” was a tool and a weapon in the hands of people who did not hold the power.

Now let’s look at wench, hussy, and mistress.

Wench used to simply mean a young peasant girl, but over time it became twisted into a pejorative term for a prostitute or a servant.

Hussy is simply a shortening of “housewife” but I bet you didn’t know that; most people I tell don’t. Because over time, its meaning degraded from a woman who ran a household to “an immoral, brazen, or lewd woman, or a disrespectful and mischievous girl.” Because make no mistake: running a large household in olden times was no easy task. It was project management and diplomacy on a grand scale, and contributed enormous amounts to the household and area’s economy. It was a position of power — as was a “mistress.”

And let’s compare mistress to its male counterpart, master, which has retained its respectability. While “mistress” used to mean a woman who held power in a similar way to a master, its meaning has also degraded to “a woman in a long-term, ongoing romantic and sexual relationship with a man (usually married) to whom she is not married.”

Interesting, isn’t it? How neutral or positive terms for young women or older women with power have been twisted into something ugly to shame us.

But’s not all gendered. Some of it is class-based.

Take villain as an example. The word comes from the 14th century term villanus, which originally meant a farm servant or peasant who worked on a country estate (villa). Over time, the landowners and parasitic classes (oh yes I did) conflated their own poor estate workers with roughness, bad manners, and criminality, and the word shifted to match.

Or knave which originally meant a boy, a male servant, or a man of humble birth. I.e. a poor guy. These days, though, it refers to a rogue or a scoundrel, someone who’s dishonest, untrustworthy, or unprincipled.

Words have power. The words we use matter. They shape the way we see the world and the people around us.

Occasionally I’ll read an item of news in which “migrants swarm across a local town.” Do you know what else swarms? Ants. Rats. Locusts. It’s a subtle but effective way of dehumanising a group of humans the writer doesn’t like.

They don’t have to call the migrants animals; they don’t need to be that blatant. They just need to choose a verb that we usually associate with vermin.

There’s so much negative rhetoric out there at the moment, it’s more important than ever that we use our words to build something precious and kind and lasting.

We could do worse than getting together, offline, to gossip. About the people who can help us, the people who want to harm us, and what we can do to build a world that’s safer for us all.

The way we talk to and about each other and ourselves is the foundation of how we see the world. And the way we write about the things we care about makes even more of an impact, because when something’s down there in a book on paper in black and white, suddenly it carries MUCH more weight than when Trevor down the pub makes an off-colour remark. It legitimises the off-colour remark in a way that’s difficult to wipe away.

If you have something to say that deserves that weight, you need to know exactly what it is before you start writing.

That’s what Book Breakthrough: Unlocked is for. In 90 minutes on Zoom, we pin down your book’s core idea, who it’s for, and how it’s structured. You leave with a blueprint, the recording, and a plan you can write from.

TTFN,

Vicky 🫡

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