Bethany

“I think the golden rule for men should be: If you’re a man, don’t say anything to a woman on the street that you wouldn’t want a man saying to you in prison.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“people’s pronouns just like you think of their names. You can’t tell a person’s name just by looking at them; if you want to know it, you have to ask, and to argue with their answer would be weird and rude.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“…political correctness does not endanger our freedom of expression at all. The only thing it actually threatens is the notion that we can separate our word choices from our politics – that how we choose to communicate doesn’t say something deeper about who we are. As American English speakers, we are perfectly at liberty to use whatever language we want; we just have to know that our words reveal our social and moral beliefs to some extent… What rubs people the wrong way about political correctness is not that they can’t use certain words anymore, it’s that political neutrality is no longer an option.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“While protesting a staff of nerdy, underpaid lexicographers is not the most effective way to enact social change, it is true that as a society, treating dictionary definitions as fixed, unbiased facts is a mistake. Word meanings and cultural beliefs go hand in hand, and they are both changing all the time.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language