Discriminating Women with Derogatory Words Essay Example
Bill Nesbitt
English 102-069
Major Paper 2
In order to gain an adequate perspective of the types of slang words used among my peers, I decided to hangout with my friends for a night, taking note of the slang used without letting them know. The group of friends consisted of all males, six including myself to be exact, in the library, which made my note-taking less obvious. We had gotten a private study room, and this allowed for the conversation to be amongst ourselves, permitting the language used to be similar to if it were going on in one of our houses. If we had been in a large, public study area, the language, I imagine, would be quite different. While in the library, studying gave way to casual conversation before long, and my list of slang began to flow. The language was as one would expect to come from a group of college-aged males. Topics shifted from sex to drinking to drug use to food and back to sex again. Reflecting back on the language I had heard, I realized how much the maturity level of males can drop when not in the company of females. My list consisted largely of dirty, crude sexual terms, and derogatory words and phrases to describe females and their roles in sex and society. A sentence used by a friend of mine that grabbed my attention in particular was, "guys, let's go out this weekend and get some bitches." The slang word that he used was bitch, a word that has been commonly used in the English language for many years. It's not just this word that inspired me to study it, for it is rather common, but rather the wide variety of usages for the word bitch that have evolved. Depending heavily on the context it is used in and who is using it, the word bitch can mean anything from its literal meaning to something positive to something considered very depreciative and belittling for women. In my group of friends, its use has evolved into the latter of the three. The use of the word bitch among college aged males has evolved into
English 102-069
Major Paper 2
In order to gain an adequate perspective of the types of slang words used among my peers, I decided to hangout with my friends for a night, taking note of the slang used without letting them know. The group of friends consisted of all males, six including myself to be exact, in the library, which made my note-taking less obvious. We had gotten a private study room, and this allowed for the conversation to be amongst ourselves, permitting the language used to be similar to if it were going on in one of our houses. If we had been in a large, public study area, the language, I imagine, would be quite different. While in the library, studying gave way to casual conversation before long, and my list of slang began to flow. The language was as one would expect to come from a group of college-aged males. Topics shifted from sex to drinking to drug use to food and back to sex again. Reflecting back on the language I had heard, I realized how much the maturity level of males can drop when not in the company of females. My list consisted largely of dirty, crude sexual terms, and derogatory words and phrases to describe females and their roles in sex and society. A sentence used by a friend of mine that grabbed my attention in particular was, "guys, let's go out this weekend and get some bitches." The slang word that he used was bitch, a word that has been commonly used in the English language for many years. It's not just this word that inspired me to study it, for it is rather common, but rather the wide variety of usages for the word bitch that have evolved. Depending heavily on the context it is used in and who is using it, the word bitch can mean anything from its literal meaning to something positive to something considered very depreciative and belittling for women. In my group of friends, its use has evolved into the latter of the three. The use of the word bitch among college aged males has evolved into