"Don’t Say Seminal, It’s Sexist" So we must remove all gendered metaphors from language?

Pershing48 · 2014-04-29T11:17:58+00:00

I view this more as an opportunity for people to learn really awesome etymologies. Like how "seminal", "seminary", and "seminar" all refer back to "seed". Or how "testify" came about because Ancient Greeks were literally swearing by their testicles. Fun stuff

PierceHarlan · 2014-04-29T12:04:50+00:00

Uggggggg these people, I just can't...can we have a national feminist/SJW just shut the hell up day? Just one day a year when they shut the hell up.

PierceHarlan · 2014-04-29T13:10:46+00:00

If this is indicative of feminists, then feminists are nuts.

My favorite nutty comment:

I don’t think the historical origin of a word is salient in a conversation about sexism. What matters most is how people experience/interpret the word today. I believe commentators when the say they never made masculine associations with the word “seminal,” but if many women do and they feel uncomfortable with it, are we really going to tell them they are wrong? Doesn’t this sort of delegitimization of those women’s experiences echo patriarchy?

guywithaccount · 2014-04-29T17:08:43+00:00

There's nothing harder to take seriously than a FEMinist who complains about gendered language.

Next!

SporkTornado · 2014-04-29T17:18:59+00:00

I wonder how she will react when she learns the word orchid is from the Greek word orkhis, meaning testicle. The Greeks thought the bulbs of the orchid flower looked like human testicles. So they literally named the plant after testicles.

2014-04-29T17:33:23+00:00

A professor did this to me in a seminar in grad school. She told me I had to use the word "germinal" instead.

EDIT: I saw /u/Pershing48's comment. I guess it was a germinar.

2014-04-29T20:07:01+00:00

Yes, “seminal” refers simultaneously to groundbreaking intellectual work and male bodily fluids expelled at the peak of sexual excitement. First, the metaphor doesn’t even entirely make sense. although the work, like the fluid, is a seed, to earn the seminal descriptor, a work has to have grown into something rich and complex. It cannot, as semen is wont to do, shoot into an unreceptive environment where it is wiped away, left to quickly die, and ultimately forgotten. Moreover, the metaphor is downright vulgar. It evokes (at least for me) the image of some dude splooging his ideas all over everything. Finally, and most importantly, the metaphor is blatantly sexist.

She's the one who's being vulgar and sexist.

A seminal work is a work that sowed the seeds for further works, semen being the Latin for seed.

Semen as a male bodily fluid originates in a metaphor that's probably been independently invented by speakers of every language ever - he spread his seed, he sowed his wild oats.

But sure, if you find semen and masculinity to be sufficiently offensive, you should consider the word seed to be tainted, along with all of its metaphorical offshoots and adjacencies. What might you come to?

Up to a generation or two ago, educated people could be assumed to have studied Latin in school, so seminal wasn't a dead metaphor - writers would have chosen the word and readers would have understood the word with the etymology in mind. Schoolchildren knew the etymology. These days, you can evidently be an academic in a humanities subject without knowing Latin, and without even being familiar with a decent historical English dictionary.

Title	"Don’t Say Seminal, It’s Sexist" So we must remove all gendered metaphors from language?
Author	[deleted]
Upvotes	1
Comments	10
Date	April 29, 2014 10:20 AM UTC (12 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/249lgi/dont_say_seminal_its_sexist_so_we_must_remove_all/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/dont-say-seminal-its-sexist-so-we-must-remove-all.1001206 https://theredarchive.com/post/1001206

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