How English Lost Its Genders
Listen to Slate’s show about how a simple quirk of grammar may affect the way we think.
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Listen to Lexicon Valley Episode No. 9: And May He Be a Masculine Bridge.
Does talking about an object as masculine or feminine somehow cause us to think of it that way? In the second part of a Lexicon Valley series about language and gender, Bob Garfield and I discuss the fascinating research by Stanford psychologist Lera Boroditsky involving grammar and perception. We talk also about what may have happened to grammatical gender in English. That’s right, once upon a time we had grammatical gender too. But then we lost it.
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