11/26/2023 0 Comments Blight definition russianYou learn it, then you know what it is you’ve been seething about. Having the words to describe a problem makes sense of a problem, changes how you regard yourself and your ’splainer, and provides fellowship: I’m not the first person to be treated this way I’m not the first to fight back.Īs one professor of Women’s Studies told me, “ Knowing the word allows you to discover your outrage. In Greek, Japanese, Portuguese, Swedish, and many other languages, the English “mansplaining” just gets dropped into the conversation, and folks nod. Iceland made its own variant (“ hrútskýring,” or “ ramsplaining”) the 2016 Word of the Year - and named a beer after it. In 2015, the Swedish Language Council welcomed “mansplaining” to its list of new Swedish words. Click To TweetĪlthough the term “mansplaining” originated in the United States, the practice may very well be universal - and in fact, the term has already moved abroad. When I wrote the essay…I surprised myself in seeing that what starts out as minor social misery can expand into violent silencing and even violent death.” ’Splaining is about wielding one’s privilege in a way that undermines the folks who get ’splained. It’s a silly word, but serious business.Īs Solnit said of her original essay, “ The battle for women to be treated like human beings with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of involvement in cultural and political arenas continues, and it is sometimes a pretty grim battle. It’s only avoided by conscious consideration of context and a willingness to cede the pedestal to others.īasically, ’splaining - be it mansplaining, whitesplaining, or Trumpsplaining - is about wielding one’s privilege in a way that undermines the folks who get ’splained. The individual man who does this is just as likely to be unaware that he’s doing this as he is to be a blatant sexist. Mansplaining doesn’t mean “explaining done by a man.” It means “ a man chose to barge in with explanations without checking the credentials of anyone else in the conversation, assuming his were better than anyone else’s in the room - i.e., that he was the expert by default.” It is the consequence of a culture that devalues non-men, especially non-white non-men. Kat Tanaka Okopnik, author of the forthcoming Dictionary of Social Justice, goes into more detail: In 2014, Salon declared the word dead (the true sign of making it) the Oxford Dictionaries added “mansplain” as an entry and the Macquarie Dictionary named it Word of the Year.Īt its most basic, “mansplaining” refers to - as a 2015 Merriam-Webster “ Words We’re Watching” column put it - “ what occurs when a man talks condescendingly to someone (especially a woman) about something he has incomplete knowledge of, with the mistaken assumption that he knows more about it than the person he’s talking to does.”īut there’s a bit more to it than that. In 2010, “mansplainer” was a New York Times Word of the Year. “Mansplain” made its way into the Urban Dictionary in 2009. Soon after, “mansplaining” became a linguistic phenomenon, helping women to finally define an experience that had long plagued them. Its first known use was among LiveJournal blog commenters, shortly after the publication of Rebecca Solnit’s Los Angeles Times essay, “Men who explain things.”Īlthough Solnit did not coin the phrase, she later told Guernica, “the essay makes it clear mansplaining is not a universal flaw of the gender, just the intersection between overconfidence and cluelessness where some portion of that gender gets stuck. A handy crowdsourced linguistic guide to a universal blight.Īt this point, “mansplaining” is a crucial part of the American cultural consciousness- but in fact, the now-ubiqitous term only dates back to 2008.
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