A while back, I read H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman‘s excellent book Articulate While Black. The book takes an in-depth look at racialized public reaction to Barack Obama especially as a candidate for president. One phenomenon they explore is the use of the…
College Board, the company that designs and administers the Scholastic Achievement Test (“the SAT”, the most popular standardized test used in admissions to colleges and universities in the United States), recently announced that it would be releasing a revised form of the…
As I’ve been researching the gendered nature of bossy, I’ve gotten a lot of important feedback from fellow linguists, who have helped to strengthen the argument in favor of viewing bossy as a word that is applied to women and girls more than…
My post on the gendered use of the word bossy has gotten a lot of attention in the past week. In it, I presented a modest bit of data to support Sheryl Sandberg’s campaign attempting to raise awareness of the obstacles…
Recently, public figures like Sheryl Sandberg and Ariana Huffington have been calling attention to the labeling of young girls’ behaviors and particularly how the labels are often differently applied to young girls but not young boys. In particular the word bossy…
linguistic pulse 