What is the animal whose name starts with a “t” and has seven alphabets? No, tortoise is eight, turkey is only six.

I faced this question while playing hangman with my daughter and had to shamelessly ask for a hint. “It has stripes” she said. Hmm? “No, no”, I retorted, tiger is only a five letter word. Can you count properly?” With a slightly amazed face she said “not a tiger, but a tigress”.

I was dumb-struck, as it occurred to me how we take the tiger, the male, as the representative of the species and never mention tigress. Isn’t this a sexist attitude practised by, shall we say, mankind?

When the female of the species is of economic benefit to humans, they do make a distinction. A cow is referred to and revered. A hen, thanks to the eggs she lays, is mentioned separate from the cock. But a female dog, not of much value to anyone except a dog-breeder – let us not talk about its esteemed name reference.

God is male and Goddess is too unwieldy to write – making the male name the default for all things holy. This is true for many words where the female name is derived from the male and hence longer – including the words ‘female’ and ‘women’. Notable exception is the word bride which is shorter than the male 'bride groom', possibly because the language thinks marriage is a women’s thing.

I am not making these observations with a feminist agenda, honestly. We express ourselves with language and it thus expresses who we are. Gender forms a very important identity, that is universal and extends beyond race and religion. By letting old words continue carelessly, we let old attitudes – which were undoubtedly oppressive to women – continue.

Take the word “Sati” for instance. This word is out of circulation, after the practise died. Today, when kids read about it, they are quite astonished that this was normal. It took a lot of time and effort to bury that word. Aside from changing the practise to get a word out, in some cases changing the word may lead to creating a new-normal – as in the case of using ‘person’ instead of ‘man’. Words such as spokesperson and business person are doing a lot of service in changing the stereotype image people hold.

So, although it may not make any difference if the tiger represented both the male and female of the species, I am not sure if that is the case for ‘manual’ or ‘mastermind’. Also disturbing is that although gender neutral, ‘official’ and ‘banker’ brings up images of men rather than women.

Words created the world, so we need to not just watch our words but also match it to the world we want to create.

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