Books like Wordslut — picked by fans

The more I learned about the social structures and constructs that perpetuate violence against women, the more I saw how deeply rooted the ideas are in the stories that we tell—the stories that we’ve been telling for centuries. Why aren’t women believed? Where do the misogynistic tropes come from?

This book shows how our culture’s origin stories have been shaped by men, and as Lesser writes, “embedded in the stories are the values and priorities we live by, and what we believe about women and men, power and war, sex and love.” What I love about this book is that it reimagines if women had been the storytellers, and empowers readers to redefine women and power. 

I’ve been watching the Miss America pageant since elementary school, when I wore a tin foil crown, a towel pinned as a cap, and stuffed my swimsuit with tennis balls for boobs. So learning the history – how suffragettes used beauty pageants as a way to get attention – was fascinating. Friedman is a sociology professor whose mom was Miss America 1970, so there is no greater expert. We get both sides here: the sparkly benefits plus a dive into the body-shaming and bulimia of the 80s when they printed measurements in the program. A Boob’s Life, covers the history of breast implants in the contest, so I quote her as a source. But I would have read it just for fun.

You’d think the subtitle says it all, but nope. Chocano loved reading bedtime stories to her daughter, but when even Alice and Wonderland proved problematic, she peered through the looking glass to see why. She explores the challenges of raising a female in a world of Disney Princesses, Playboy bunnies, and popular TV shows and movies. She even takes aim at the female manifesto, Eat Pray Love, bless her heart. I met Chocano at a reading of this book when I was nervously submitting A Boob’s Life to publishers. I was thrilled to find overlap with such a kindred spirit. You’ll find Chocana’s byline in major magazines featuring celebrity interviews, but without the snark. Personally, I love the snark - it makes the facts more fun.

Mikki Kendall’s account of what Black women and girls are up against in America left me angry and devastated. Her description of how Black girls are sexualized at shockingly young ages and how portraying them this way enables sexual abuse absolutely gutted me.

For me, this book was a powerful reminder of why no woman is safe in a culture that says you have to be viewed as respectable in order to be worthy of protection from violence.

I was surprised and delighted by every page of this book: it tells a pacey story of history, from the first farmers to our lives today, by unpacking the meaning of words from across time.

It's the story of our deep inner life conveyed in language. I love etymology because words are what Barfield calls “fossils of consciousness”. To dig up when words first appeared or how they have profoundly shifted in meaning is to truly rediscover the inner lives of our ancestors.

Did you know that nihilism only surfaced in the 18th century or that the ancient Greeks had no word for “blue”? Such details delight in this book.

A few years ago, an old friend proposed that we make the dictionary our next book club selection. An idea too ridiculous to resist. But which dictionary to choose?

Unless you're retired, good luck finishing the 22,000-page Oxford English Dictionary. We opted instead for the excellent American Heritage Dictionary, which at ~100 pages per month only took us two years. 

For a guy who thought he knew a lot of words already, I was pulled up short fairly often by discoveries such as "callipygian," "relating to or having buttocks that are considered beautifully proportioned." And even when the word was familiar, the etymology could delight, for example, when I learned that "clue" derived from "Theseus's use of a ball of thread as a guide through the Cretan labyrinth."

And that was just in the letter C.

In 1971, in response to a protest by women students at the Harvard Divinity School against the masculine universal, the chair of Harvard’s linguistics department, Calvert Watkins, wrote a letter to Crimson, cosigned by other colleagues. Explaining the concept of ‘markedness,’ he contended there was “really no cause for anxiety or pronoun-envy on the part of those seeking such changes.” Anna Livia’s book─originally her PhD thesis at Berkeley, uses the controversial phrase as the departure point for an enlightening analysis of a wide range of English and French texts problematizing the traditional linguistic gender system. The study reveals that rather than stemming from undue envy, gendered language is justifiably at the core of feminist battles. How can we express ourselves fully if our identities are not adequately represented in discourse?

There was probably never a language documentary as compelling as The Story of English, and the companion book The Story of English was an inspiration for my own book – and my title.

How could the language of a small out-of-the-way island go global and become the entire world’s second language? Conquest? (that’s a plus and a minus) Dysfunctional spelling and crazy grammar? (joke) Political and cultural good fortune? (Definitely.) But what else? And to what ends?

And this language ‘game’ has had so many players besides the English – the Scots, the Irish, the Americans, Africa, and Asia. And of course, 35 years ago no one could have imagined how many more global roles English would be playing.

Lincoln was a great communicator, whose greatest speeches deliver emotional power through unfussy language. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of the best-selling page-turner Uncle Tom’s Cabin, knew a thing or two about language. She said Lincoln’s compelling words had “the relish and smack of the soil.” Douglas Wilson’s study is an exercise in historical detection. Sleuth-like he uses the successive manuscript drafts of Lincoln’s speeches and public letters to show his care in choosing his words, and how alert he was to sense, sound, imagery, context, and clarity. Lincoln’s Sword is a masterpiece, a showcase of the literary and political sensibilities that made Wilson an acclaimed winner of the Lincoln Prize.

Don’t be put off by the dry-sounding title. This book is the authoritative A-Z reference on the “flowers of rhetoric”: all the “figures” and “tropes”, or twists and turns of language that make it beautiful, memorable – and persuasive.

But it’s more than just a geek-heaven cabinet of curiosities: it’s full of history and philosophy, of wisdom and humour. I know of no other scholarly reference book that brings more joy and amusement.