Cunning Linguistic Deformations

I was writing the line “pleasant summer sounds like the screeching of harradans and the roaring of neanderthals”. Then I looked up the spelling for “harradan” and found it was actually “harridan”. But I saw an unfamiliar word listed in the synonym section. ‘Virago’. Clicking on that (Dictionary.com is convenient that way.) it brought up that word’s meaning. There were two. The au currant definition was “a loud-voiced, ill-tempered, scolding woman; shrew”. But the Archaic definition, the original one, was “a woman of strength or spirit.”

So before there was a movement to remove gender-disparaging words from our language there was a much longer-term devolution of our language from positive images of women to negative ones.

Not that anybody gets called a virago any more, but it sure is an example of what Tom writes about–the suppression of the Goddess by male-centered religion. A good reminder to us guys that the shrew or nag might be just a strong woman with a message. Not always but we should keep the possibility in mind.