Andrea Williams
drandreawilliams@aol.com
The Importance of the Right Word for the Clarity of Meaning
A few years ago, I was grading some letters from my students in Business Communications
(BUAD 66) over Spring Break when my daughter was visiting. Occasionally I would read a
sentence out loud to her, to get another opinion if the sentence sounded right, especially if the
word used was in the correct context. After half a dozen of these Michelle began to get a bit
irate, and told me that I was too tough on the students for their word choices, and that one word
was just as good as another. That “discussion” escalated; neither one of us backing down.
Finally, to shove my point down her throat, I said, “OK, ****, have it your own way.” She,
understandably, became quite upset. I continued with, “I don’t know why you’re upset, ‘****’ is
just another word for ‘woman,’ and one word is just as good as another.” The heated discussion
ended, but you can imagine the fight that ensued. After we both calmed down, of course I
apologized. Michelle did too, and acknowledged that words are not the same.
That fight got me to thinking. When I was in high school, I learned about words having one of
three connotations: positive, neutral, or negative. I decided to use this incident to present a
workshop to my students. For homework I asked them to write down five words that mean
“woman” or “girl,” and the so-called “bad” ones were fine. The next class period I asked for
people to call out their words, and typed them out in alphabetical order. No one was brave
enough to use two, so I typed them as s*** and c***, explaining that we all knew them, but that
I didn’t want to offend anyone because of the emotional content they can carry.
Last, we split each word into one of the three connotative categories. Some fit into more than one
category, depending on the context in which the word is used. At the end of this – about half an
hour - many people were surprised that (1) there were so many synonyms for “woman” or “girl,”
and (2) that it often really does matter which word is picked. This lesson carried over into their
making careful word choices for many of their written assignments. They realized that they
simply cannot use a thesaurus and opt for the first synonym that pops up.
Neutral: Woman or Girl
Airhead
Better half
Bride
Chippie
Dame *
Doll
Girlfriend
Hottie
Little woman
Madam
Old bag
Sister
S***
Babe
Bimbo
Bobcat (20s)
Cougar
Darling
Drama queen
Goddess
Hon
Lovie
Mama
Old lady
Skank
Sweetheart
Baby
Bitch
Broad
C***
Dearest
Femme fatale
Hag
Honey
Luv
Miss
Princess
Skirt
Wench
Ball and chain
Blonde
Chick
Damsel
Diva
Gal
Hen
Lady
Ma’am
Mother
Saber-tooth tiger (50s)
Slush
Witch