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Certainly the compilers of the new Sispeak have no such totalitarian purposes. Big Sister is not yet watching, and from the beginning the feminist wordsmiths have had to endure mockery and ridicule. Cartoonists and satirists have suggested that the ladies were Libbing under a Msapprehension. Their inventions were Msanthropic and Msguided attempts to change herstory. The Godmother was to be Mario Puzo's new Mafia novel; Womandarin Critic Susan Daughtertag was the new bottle for the old whine. Shedonism, girlcotting and countess-downs were to be anticipated in the liberated '70s. As for the enemy, he could expect to be confronted by female belligerents inviting him to put up his duchesses. He would find, in short, that his gander was cooked. All flagrantly gendered words would be swiftly unsexed. The ottoman would become the otto-it, the highboy would metamorphose into the high-thing, and ladyfingers would be served under the somewhat less appealing name of person-fingers.
Yet beyond the hoots and herstrionics, the feminists seemed to have reason on their side. Tradition does play favorites with gender. Man, master, father are the commonplaces of theological and political leadership. Who, for example, could imagine the Four Horsepersons of the Apocalypse or George Washington, first in the hearts of his countrypeople? Even the literature of equality favors the male: Robert Burns sang "A man's a man for a' that!" "Mann ist Mann," echoed Brecht. "Constant labor of one uniform kind," wrote Karl Marx, "destroys the intensity and flow of a man's animal spirits." The U.N. Charter speaks of the scourge of war, which "has brought untold sorrow to mankind." It is pathetically easy to spy in this vocabulary a latent slavery, a cloaked prejudice aimed at further subjugating women in the name of language.
No wonder, then, that the movement has set out to change the dictionary. With a touching, almost mystical trust in words, it seems to believe that definition is a matter of will. And indeed sometimes it is. The change from Negro to black has helped to remake a people's view of itself. But it is a lone example. Far more often, words have been corrupted by change. The counterculture's overuse of "love" has not resulted in a lessening of hostilities; "heavy" has become a lightweight adjective. The abuse of the word media has resulted in a breakdown of intelligence; invitations have even been sent out to "Dear media person." For the most part, the new lexicographers behave like Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass: a word may mean whatever they want it to mean. Naturally, said Humpty, "when I make a word do a lot of work, I always pay it extra." One wonders what Women's Lib's new words will be paid. They are, after all, working overtime, and against immense cultural and sociological odds.