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This startled me in the same way as a really excellent magic trick. You are convinced it's not going to catch you out, but then it does. I pride myself of havin
by feintruled 5y ago
This startled me in the same way as a really excellent magic trick. You are convinced it's not going to catch you out, but then it does. I pride myself of having a wide vocabulary (or so I thought) and the premise sounded unlikely to me and yet I knew all the male words and didn't know the majority of the female words. What an eye opener!
- Yajirobe 5y agoMeh, the female ones don't seem to be English (at least a lot of them). The male ones are mostly international words.
- dymk 5y agoIf they’re not English, aren’t the female words also international words then too? Why’s that meh?
- eckmLJE 5y agothey're all english - peplum - late 17th century: via Latin from Greek peplos . - boucle - late 19th century: French, literally ‘buckled, curled’. - pessary - late Middle English: from late Latin pessarium, based on Greek pessos ‘oval stone’ (used in board games). - doula - 1960s: modern Greek, from Greek doulē ‘female slave’. - chignon - late 18th century: from French, originally ‘nape of the neck’, based on Latin catena ‘chain’. - tulle - early 19th century: from Tulle, a town in SW France, where it was first made. etc
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dimitrios1 5y agoInteresting, doule in modern greek just means work. Doula is one I would have never known had it not been for the pregnant women in my life.
- blueflow 5y agoHaving had latin in school, i understood some of the female words via their latin word roots.
- AlgorithmicTime 5y ago
- brimble 5y agoThe female words are largely romance language loan words because they're related to textiles and fashion and, in the English speaking world, France and Italy dominate those fields (or did for a long enough time, historically, that tons of the terminology comes from their languages, anyway). They're still English.
- caf 5y agoAgreed they're still English. It's a little interesting how many from both sides of the list are loanwords, though - on the "male" side there's examples like howitzer, aileron, strafe and katana. I wonder if there's an effect here because loanwords are harder to learn?
- kelnos 5y agoI had the same thought! I (rather arrogantly) assumed that I would know most or all of the "female" words. Turned out I recognized less than half, and could define only a couple.
- aidenn0 5y agoI actually knew most of the words; apparently though I'm in the minority of men for not knowing taffeta. After looking it up, I'm slightly surprised that tulle is so much lower than taffeta given that both are used in gowns and I run into references to tulle in poetry all the time[1]. On the other hand, I am in good male company for being completely mystified by peplum only to find it's another word for "overskirt." I'm also in the 1/8 of all men in not recognizing the word shemale, though if wikipedia is right it's just she-male missing the hyphen? Perhaps I was primed by all of the fashion words but I read it with a french pronunciation... 1: e.g. https://poets.org/poem/because-i-could-not-stop-death-479 https://poets.org/poem/because-i-could-not-stop-death-479 (written by a woman)
- computerfriend 5y agoArrested Development make a joke about exactly that French mispronunciation. https://arresteddevelopment.fandom.com/wiki/Shémale_shirt https://arresteddevelopment.fandom.com/wiki/Shémale_shirt
- dillondoyle 5y agoI know that one from Will and Grace with the Gay spelling bee! I got most of the women ones a lot are clothes/fashion/hair. I guess gay helps get a larger vocabulary ;)
- ncmncm 5y agoEvidently you-all haven't seen Clerks yet. Lucky, you still get to see it for the first time.
- aidenn0 5y agoI saw it 20ish years ago.