passive substance just waiting to be eaten. So names like peach, cookie, a dish, sugar, or sweetie-pie were often referred as nicknames for woman. The final point that Nilsen makes are that women are connected with negative connotation and men with positive connotations. Positive connotations are associated with the idea of a man while negative or trivial connotations are connected with the corresponding feminine concept. She states that early in life, children are conditioned to the superiority of the masculine role. Little girls have much more freedom to experiment with sex role and do little boys. If a little girl acts like a tomboy, most parents have mixed feelings, being at least partly proud. But if their little boy acts like a sissy, they are ready to call a psychologist. Girls can wear jeans but boys better not wear skirts for fear of reticulation. Nilsen also points out that girls can have boy’s names but it is unacceptable for a boy to have a girl name. The differences in the connotations between positive male and negative female connotations can be seen in several pairs of words that differ only in the matter of sex. Bachelor has a positive connection to being single man but yet an unmarried woman is called a spinster or an old maid. When men are doing jobs that often women do, we try to pay men extra by giving them fancy titles for example a male cook is more likely to be called a chef while a male seamstress will get the title of tailor. Other terms that show how negatively we view old women as compared to young women are old nag as compared to filly, old crow or old bat as compared to bird, and being catty as compared to being kittenish. There are no matching metaphors for men.Nilsen began this study of the dictionary not with the intention of prescribing language change but simply to see what the language would reveal about sexism to her. Sexism is not something that existing independently in American En...
