A diachronic evaluation of gender asymmetry in euphemism (2021)

Abstract: The use of euphemisms is a known driver of language change. It has been proposed that women use euphemisms more than men. Although there have been several studies investigating gender differences in language, the claim about euphemism usage has not been tested comprehensively through time. If women do use euphemisms more, this could mean that women also lead the formation of new euphemisms and language change over time. Using four large diachronic text corpora of English, we evaluate the claim that women use euphemisms more than men through a quantitative analysis. We assembled a list of 106 euphemism-taboo pairs to analyze their relative use through time by each gender in the corpora. Contrary to the existing belief, our results show that women do not use euphemisms with a higher proportion than men. We repeated the analysis using different subsets of the euphemism-taboo pairs list and found that our result was robust. Our study indicates that in a broad range of settings involving both speech and writing, and with varying degrees of formality, women do not use or form euphemisms more than men.

## introduction what role does gender play in language change and use? this question has long been a matter of discussion among linguists. in robin lakoff's influential work on this topic, she proposes many ways in which language spoken by women and about women differs from language used by and about men @xcite . lakoff discusses the causes of these differences and what they tell us about women's role in society. the difference we focus on in this study is one she mentions only briefly, namely that women use euphemisms more than men do @xcite . lakoff is not the first to propose this difference. @xcite also claims that women use euphemisms more often, and discusses this supposed characteristic of women's language at length. both lakoff and jespersen believe that women use euphemisms more out of a desire to speak more tactfully and to avoid directly mentioning "unladylike" topics. for example, jespersen states that women have often invented euphemisms to avoid mentioning "certain parts of the human body and certain natural functions" @xcite . euphemisms have been considered as an important driver of language change @xcite . as a euphemism becomes conventionalized, it may become taboo by its association with a taboo topic, and thus ends up being replaced by a new euphemism. this process has been dubbed the euphemism treadmill by @xcite . while @xcite considers euphemism use to be a sign of linguistic conservatism, given what we know about the euphemism treadmill it may also be reasonable to associate euphemisms with linguistic innovation. since women are thought to use euphemisms and invent new euphemisms in order to avoid taboo, a finding that women do in fact use euphemisms more could be an indication that women are leading the euphemism treadmill process. one may take for granted that women use euphemisms more than men, because this idea has been proposed by two renowned linguistics, and with a few decades between them. however, both jespersen and lakoff base this claim primarily on anecdotal evidence. to our knowledge, no one has attempted to quantitatively evaluate whether greater use of euphemisms is characteristic of women's speech. here we analyze euphemism usage through time by men and women in four large text corpora of english to test this claim. specifically, we examine whether at a given time point in history, women use euphemisms with a greater proportion in usage frequency than men do. ## methodology we quantify euphemism usage by a proportion measure specifying how frequently a given euphemism is used in natural language out of the sum of usage counts of that euphemism and its corresponding taboo expression. this is how we interpret lakoff and jespersen's claim that women use euphemisms more. if they only meant that women use euphemisms more without a higher euphemism proportion, then their claim would be simply that women discuss taboo topics more frequently than men, euphemistically or not, which we do not believe is their intention. hence, we evaluate whether women use euphemisms more by testing whether they tend to have a higher euphemism proportion. ## results we first analyze for all euphemism-taboo pairs, the number of times they are used by each gender, and for how many of these pairs women have a higher euphemism proportion than men do. we then perform focused analyses on selected subsets of the list of euphemism-taboo pairs. these analyses respectively examine: only pairs where the euphemism or taboo is a multi-word phrase, and only pairs which meet the cut-off threshold for all four corpora (i.e., the conjunction set of euphemism-taboo pairs). we find in all the analyses that women do not use euphemisms more than men. to consider statistical variation in the analyses, we repeatedly sampled 25 times for each gender at each year for each corpus. to alleviate data sparsity, we placed the counts for the us congr. and canadian parl. in 10-year bins, and placed the data for reddit and nyt in 2-year bins. we also excluded all pairs which did not meet a certain frequency threshold, to eliminate very sparse, unreliable results. for each euphemism-taboo pair and each corpus, we check that both the euphemism and the taboo appear at least once in 10% or more of the 25 samples. if not, we omit that pair from the results for that corpus. the number of pairs out of the 106 that meet the frequency threshold for reddit is 32, nyt is 80, canadian parl. is 35, and us congr. is 34. using a one-tailed welch's unequal variances t-test, for each pair we compared the euphemism proportions in all 25 samples between genders. we recorded the fraction of pairs for which women had a significantly higher euphemism proportion than men at @xmath0.05, and vice versa for men. if women use euphemisms more than men, we would expect this to return a large percent of pairs where woman have a higher euphemism proportion than men, and a smaller percent of pairs for men. figure 1 shows the euphemism and taboo expression frequencies by gender over time for the pair lady (euphemism) vs. woman. the top two rows show binned frequencies, and the third row shows the euphemism proportion from equation 1 . this pair is one that specifically relates to women, and that @xcite proposed and explained in detail. we see as expected that women say both lady and woman more than men do. however, women do not say the euphemism lady with a higher proportion than men do. in fact, we find that men use this particular euphemism with a substantially higher proportion than women in three of the four corpora for almost their entire time spans. to summarize the euphemism proportion results, figure 2 shows the percent of pairs over time where either women have a significantly higher euphemism proportion than men, men have a significantly higher euphemism proportion than women, or neither gender has a significantly higher euphemism proportion. the individual euphemism-taboo pair plots and the euphemism proportion summary plots show that in all corpora, across the entire time span of 1951-2018, women do not lead in their euphemismtaboo usage proportion. the majority of pairs show no clear leader between men and women. there are some euphemism-taboo pairs where both expressions are said more frequently by women than men, for example women say lady and woman far more than men do in all four corpora, which is to be expected. we also repeated this analysis with bins three times larger for each corpus to see if data sparsity affected our results (6 years for reddit and nyt, 30 years for canadian parl. and us congr.). this increases the number of euphemism-taboo pairs which surpass the frequency threshold for all four corpora, but we found the results still hold that women do not have a consistently higher euphemism proportion than men, and that most pairs show no significant difference in euphemism proportion. ## discussion our analysis of four large, varied datasets spanning 1951-2018 provides no support for lakoff and jespersen's claim that women use euphemisms more than men do. this result means that we cannot assume that women use euphemisms more. in general, we should not take for granted the characterization of women's language that has been proposed by linguists such as jespersen and lakoff, shufhqwrisdluv 5hgglw 1<7 zrphq phq qhlwkhu \hdu shufhqwrisdluv &dqdgldq3duo \hdu sdluv sdluv sdluv sdluv 86&rqju figure 4: percent of significant euphemism proportion in the conjunctive pairs. same as figure 2 but considering only the euphemism-taboo pairs which meet the threshold for all of the four corpora. as our study and others have shown that they are not always supported by empirical evidence @xcite . the result that women do not use euphemisms more indicates that euphemisms should not be lumped in with other polite forms that women were found to use more in other studies @xcite . our result is consistent with @xcite finding that women do not tend to use more indirect language than men. our finding raises the question, why do jespersen and lakoff say that women use euphemisms more if this is not actually the case? one reason women might appear to use euphemisms more is that they may also talk more about certain taboo topics. for example, in our results women say both chest and breast more than men do, but men say chest with a higher proportion than women. the topic of the euphemism seems to have some effect on whether men or women use it more, though at a glance these do not seem to correspond to topics that have been found to be discussed more by one gender or the other. there are of course euphemisms that women do prefer to use more than phq figure 5 : percent of time with significantly higher euphemism proportion (using the same bins we have used throughout, as described in section 4). the left heatmap indicates for a given (euphemism, taboo) pair for what percent of time women had a significantly higher euphemism proportion for that pair than men did. darker purple blocks were higher for more time, empty blocks never had a significantly higher euphemism proportion for women. the right heatmap shows the same for men, with darker orange indicating a larger percent of time. the four corpora used in this study were chosen because we needed large diachronic corpora for which the author's gender could be approximately determined. however, there are limitations to using these corpora. the language used in political proceedings and in newspapers may be regulated by political parties or the newspaper editors, which might minimize gender differences in language in these corpora. the reddit data only included posts where users had self-reported gender, which may limit the topics that are included. we did not include any natural conversation data, although that is likely the setting that lakoff and jespersen were most concerned with. there are also limitations to our selected list of euphemism-taboo pairs. the list is relatively small, and was gathered manually. this list does not represent all taboo topics, nor all types of euphemisms. however, we believe it serves as a good first step for quantitative studies of euphemism. future work on automatic euphemism detection may allow us to generate a more comprehensive list which should help with analyzing euphemism use over time and other related phenomena. our study did not directly examine whether women lead euphemism innovation and change, although our result does indicate that this is not likely to be generally true. future work could investigate who leads the formation of new euphemisms and who drives the euphemism treadmill, while considering that the answer to this question is likely context-and topic-dependant. ## conclusion the subject of how women's language and men's language differ is one that has been extensively discussed, and one alleged difference is that women use euphemisms more than men do. however, this claim has been based on anecdotal evidence. our diachronic evaluation using large corpora spanning multiple decades from a variety of contexts shows that women do not use euphemisms more than men do. our work indicates the importance of using quantitative methods to evaluate long-held beliefs about language use and language change.