More random gender-giri

....continued from here.

You almost never hear the epithet 'bastard' being hurled abusively at a woman, do you? It's always a man who's one. It's almost as if it's de facto rule, which is rather strange, given that in the purest sense, both genders can be born to the title.

Is it something about the word, perhaps? Maybe the hard ending syllable that makes it feel more masculine? (hmmm...could words themselves have genders? Find linguist. Discuss.)

Or is it a subsconscious way of balancing the scale, given that there's one definitive abusive term for females ('bitch'), but there isn't for males? Like the way we've almost-universally allocated the word gay to mean only male homosexuals, even though it defines both.

I mean, Gay and Lesbian Parade/Ball/Rights? Redundant usage, surely (although I can see why it might have been done - it probably made it less of a shocker to the fence-sitters than if it were announced as a Homosexual Parade). Come to think about it, even the word homosexual is now more or less coopted by males of such a persuasion. People mostly seem to declare themselves to be hetero-, homo- or lesbian.

...Ok that's it. Go do your own thinking now.


Edit: Some of the comments reminded me that I might have posted something related to this a while back. And I was right. Apparently, I'm now down to recycling old content.