I wouldn't say this was a guest request, more a guest prompt. I notice over on Kathleen Kirk's blog that she has just awarded me a Versatile Slattern award along with a lot of other probably more versatile and probably a lot less slatternly bloggers. You're supposed to post seven facts about yourself and pass the award on to a bunch of other bloggers, but I'm a bit tired of the current facts about myself and I don't have a huge list of bloggers who appreciate the chain letter effect, so I think the way I'm going to approach this is to highlight some blog I frequent with each of these entries for awhile. Check in at the end for a sample.
First things first, though. Before I (provisionally, and without attending to all the rules) accept this award, I think I'd better figure out what a slattern is. Basically, I think of it as a slovenly person, and okay, pretty much always a woman. Slattern, slut, slovenly, sloppy--they all seem to go together in one package in my mind. At one end, unkempt and disorderly, at the other, well, at best a bit of a tramp and at worst... no, I'm not going there. I mean, maybe a slattern will turn out to be some kind of a queen!
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Yeah, yeah--the Urban Dictionary has all of that worse end of the spectrum and then some. Tart, floozy, trollop, strumpet--these are just a few of the more polite words that are interchangeable with slattern. Also included are Britney Spears, Ann Coulter and Paris Hilton. Also apparently interchangeable is 'woman'.
And then, yes, on the other end, a 'deliberately offensive term meant to insult a woman's hygiene and grooming.'
The untidy meaning apparently came first. It is at least related to the word 'slatter'--to spill or splash awkwardly, to waste.
Of course, I had to see what Anatoly Liberman had to say about the whole thing. As usual, this is where we get into the larger and to me more interesting 'slant'. For 'slattern' turns up in his book Word Origins: and how we know them in his chapter on sound symbolism as he describes the group of words that resonate with each other simply because they start with that 'sl-' sound. As he has it, 'glide' and 'slide' are related words, but in the last, the idea of smoothness gives way to the idea of slipperiness. Sleek and slick, sled, slither, slobber--the list goes on and on. He talks a bit about the word 'sleazy'--apparently it did not come to mean sordid until around 1941. Liberman goes on,
"The adjective sleazy must have acquired its present-day meaning to conform to its sound shape. A word cannot exist in slums, surrounded by slatterns and sluts, and preserve its' purity amidst all this slime."
The author of an old dissertation (a Swiss researcher named Margrit Keller) examined British dialectal dictionaries and found about 600 words and phrases meaning “girl” and “woman.” Most of them are derogatory and harp on a few familiar notes: slovenly, lazy, garrulous, flighty, ugly, and too accessible for men’s pleasures. One or two are interesting to a linguist.
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Today's blog mention must of course go to Kathleen Kirk of Wait! I have a blog?! .After a year of daily writing on what other people were reading, she has loosened up her criteria but not her posting. Pretty much every day, Kathleen is on to something new. She's a poet, an actress, and I am getting the impression that she is currently doing something with musicals. Possibly involving the Civil War. And definitely involving the word 'skedaddle'.
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Linguistic reclamation is a bit of an odd notion when one is casting off connotations of sexual promiscuity and moral turpitude to reclaim, er, words that originally connoted sloppiness, dirt, and bad hygiene.
ReplyDeleteAs it happens, I was just this week reading about the recent slutwalks. Whether sluts or slatterns, perhaps it's best to focus more on casting off, and less on reclaiming. ==========================
Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
I was once dispatched (with absolutely no sense of irony in the mind of my instructor) to buy three Trollopes...
ReplyDeleteI refuse to use Skype because I usually look the quintessential slattern while in the safety of my own home.
Congratulations on your award.
Well deserved and to be worn with pride.
Of course I love your exploration of "slattern" here, Seana! And, yes, to clarify, you got the Versatile Blogger award, not the Versatile Slattern award! You are surely not a slovenly woman! (Well, we have not Skyped, either, so who knows? My hair, I'd say, is usually untidy! Isn't that what scrunchies are for?)
ReplyDeletePeter, you're right--reclamation is probably the wrong term, but I think it is fair to appropriate it in the same way that another group of people have 'taken back' or more rightly just taken the 'N word'.
ReplyDeleteSlattern is so rarely used in any context in the U.S. that it doesn't quite make the case. I think the article was really talking more about the word 'bitch'. But then most words for the female can be turned pejorative without much effort.
Tales, thank you. So I'm curious--who did you bring back to that professor, and how much did you have to pay them?
ReplyDeleteNot using Skype wouldn't protect me, because I don't confine looking slatternly (in the older sense)to my own home. But I did recently decline sending in a photo of my blogging space to someone who had requested it for their blog for similar reasons.
Kathleen, the way my brain works,it is pretty much all I can do not to turn this into the Virtual Slattern Award or the Veritable Slattern Award.
ReplyDeleteAs I've mentioned above, I could probably win the award in its original sloppy, slovenly, slippery sense. A situation which I am hoping to, uh, mitigate somewhat today.
The person was a very elderly spinster who loves good literature, so the joke was probably a bit limp.
ReplyDeleteI should probably get "Slattern of the Year" award as I recently filled a friend's keyboard with fine and invasive icing sugar when I turned a box of Turkish Delight upside down in order to show it a a friend at the other end of a Skype conversation.
Not a Slattern of the year award, but maybe an "Awkward Moment Award" would be indicated.
ReplyDeleteJust so we are all on the same page, those of you that refuse to use Skyp for fear of being seen as slatten should post a picture so we know what you mean. Just a thought.
ReplyDeleteWhat about those who would love to post pictures to prove they're not slatterns and slobs, but they can't find their cameras?
ReplyDeleteSeana FTW! Congrats on the well-deserved award.
ReplyDelete-Brian O
Yeah...that's not going to happen, Glenna.
ReplyDeleteBryan, thanks for your vote of confidence, but all it really means is that Kathleen likes this blog and took the time to say so. I probably will sooner or later have it revoked by whoever started this idea, because I'm not going to do any truthtelling, and I'm too slatternly to pass it along. However, I think posting a few sentences about blogs I like isn't a bad idea.
Good v word, here: blodhpog
Peter, I thought you worked for a newspaper or something like that. There has to be a camara around there somewhere.
ReplyDeleteGlenna, newsrooms are notoriously sloppy. But I was talking about my work area at home, which is not notorious.
ReplyDelete==========================
Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Peter, I meant your lack of a camara. Surey someone in the newsroom has one you could borrow.
ReplyDeleteSigh...no one remembers the bit in Jane Eyre when Jane is made to stand in front of the school with the word "slattern" on a board around her neck? Made a big impression on me that scene.
ReplyDeleteIt must be very hard to have a precise memory in an imprecise world.
ReplyDeleteI can't even remember whether it was through your blog or somewhere else that I saw the movie scene where Jane is humiliated by the teachers--maybe the same scene you describe, though I don't remember the slattern label--and then was befriended by an angelic Elizabeth Taylor.
I have to say that nothing in the Brontes novels made such a deep impression on me as a biography that my dad brought home from the library for me once. It was written for kids, but the tragedies involved in their childhoods was quite harrowing enough to last me forever.
But thanks for the addition to the post.
I have a very simple reason for not putting my photo up on the net... it's a bit like seeing oneself in a mirror and I like not having to view pages without making myself jump.
ReplyDeleteIt's nothing to do with vanity or fear of losing privacy, btw, though now that I think of it, people who like to have a strong physical sense of how others look might find this strange.
One of my children had an amusing reaction to being asked what they looked like in a chat room..."*!2""+"... what does it matter... Does it matter if I look like a forked carrot..."
I think the book of choice that week must have been "The Once and
Future King".
In fact it's from "An American Yankee in the Court of King Arthur".
ReplyDelete"This was an airy slim boy in shrimp-colored tights that made him look like a forked carrot, the rest of his gear was blue silk and dainty laces and ruffles; and he had long yellow curls, and wore a plumed pink satin cap tilted complacently over his ear."
Definitely not a slattern...
I wasn't crazy about An American Yankee in the Court of King Arthur when I read it a few years ago, but now realize that I should have read it for the prose, rather than the plot.
ReplyDeleteYeah, pictures aren't so important in this format. I like the thing they do on Wordpress if you aren't a member, which is to assign you a quilt design.
Seana
ReplyDeleteone of the most desperate ploys of the Northern Ireland Tourist Board was to renovate and build a visitors centre to the Bronte Family Homestead in County Down. Of course this is where the father came from and none of the children were ever anywhere near there.
Its amazing really that Charlotte was able to cope with so much personal tragedy without losing her mind completely, although I think Emily would have been the supreme talent had she lived.
Are you sure Branwell didn't get over there? I wouldn't put it past him.
ReplyDeleteI've mentioned elsewhere visiting Haworth in a rainy March. Aside from our gallivanting around the moors, ie, slogging through the mud, what sticks with me most was the proximity of the graveyard to the parsonage where they lived, with it's bleak black stones. They would have looked out the window directly on to all these big black headstones. Bound to take a toll on the sensitive, which I assume they all must have been.
Oh, this is it, in very much nicer weather.
ReplyDeleteI was surrounded by nutters like those who ran the school in "Jane Eyre" as a child, so the scornful words used to control the children there were not particularly memorable. The fact that the word in question is linked to "phylactery" even now seems more interesting.
ReplyDeleteHowever, Jane's ability to rise above most occasions, which is the strength of the book and of its author was a great consolation to one threatened daily by eternal damnation.
"Mr. Brocklehurst: Do you know, Jane Eyre, what happens to little children when they die?
Jane: They go to heaven.
Mr. Brocklehurst: And what happens to disobedient, deceitful girls when they die?
Jane: They go to hell.
Mr. Brocklehurst: So what must you do to avoid this terrible fate?
Jane: I must take care to keep in good health and not to fall ill, sir."
I am glad I went to school in California and Colorado by the sound of it, though not in the end all that happy with my early education.
ReplyDeleteJust looked up the slattern/phylactery reference and see that it was actually Helen Burns who had the Slattern sign, and Jane who tore it off her.
Also, just to clear up references for any possible reader, it is Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, not American Yankee.
happy with my education.
Thanks for the correction, Seana.
ReplyDeleteI'm no expert in Yankees (from what I read it is not a flattering term) and now wonder why Twain chose Connecticut, rather than some other state.
I've put a link to a biography of Mark Twain on my Twitter (Anouilh) account and the hash tag system means that any added in future can be easily found and will not need readers to rummage round in past comment boxes on various sites.
Also, there is not much to regret about an Irish childhood. It gives one (as it seems to have given Charlotte Bronte) a very keen sense of humour and mockery.
"Yankee" has its boosters and its denigrators. Probably depends on whether you are one or not, but for instance there is the famous baseball team, and every schoolkid learns, or learned, Yankee Doodle, even though to this day I don't understand the lyrics.
ReplyDeleteI don't know why Connecticut, except that Mark Twain made his home there and so probably ended up having a feel for the type.
Yeah, I don't doubt that Irish kids end up resilient. I just meant school. Our teachers were strict enough for me, and they weren't that bad.
I loved school, to the point that I became a teacher.
ReplyDeleteStrict teachers are a strange bunch, though.
I admire the vocation, though I was never under the illusion that I had any aptitude for it.
ReplyDeleteIt was the sudden strict moments of otherwise non-strict teachers that I found disconcerting.
That is why such moments work... and they are usually caused by somebody going too far.
ReplyDeleteAnd I wonder if Adrian's ability to remember "slattern" with such clarity may not be linked to the humiliating sign.
A person who tries to make another a figure of mockery for the group is a sadist and that is what Charlotte Bronte shows.
I've just noticed that my views on mockery seem paradoxical.
ReplyDeleteInclusive mockery is the source of comedy. Satire and sarcasm are linked to sadistic behaviour and while useful as a temporary tactic in exteme circumstances, I tend to avoid people who use both and who develop it as a character trait.
I think mockery and a healthy scepticism of institutions and the powerful is all to the good. It's when it's turned on the powerless that it becomes cruel.
ReplyDeleteSlattern , tart, floozy, trollop, strumpet
ReplyDeleteThey're so deliciously old-fashioned.
I'd love to be able to use them in conversation "that little strumpet is really no better as she should be" etc.
"Hussy" is also a good one. As in "That brazen little hussy, I'd like to scratch her eyes out!"
ReplyDeleteThanks for popping in, Marco! I knew there was a reason I found myself compelled to get up at 4 AM.
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ReplyDeleteSlattern , tart, floozy, trollop, strumpet, hussy. It makes a fellow want to spend an evening at a house of ill fame.
ReplyDeleteAmong painted Jezebels fallen into disrepute?
ReplyDeleteDid someone say wanton? And I don't mean soup.
ReplyDeleteI should have known when I started a blog on slatterns that it would end up in a house of ill repute.
ReplyDeleteOr, alternatively, in the soup.