Wordslut

Montell's starting point is that language both reflects and reinforces hierarchy, and that the evidence for this in English is unusually concrete: the systematic pejoration of words for women, the asymmetry between paired terms, and the absence of male equivalents for most sexual insults.

From there she turns to the policing of women's speech — uptalk, vocal fry, hedging, apologising — and shows that the features criticised are usually either innovations women lead or strategies that do measurable social work.

The features women are told to remove from their speech are usually the ones doing the most work.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The material is drawn from real sociolinguistics: Robin Lakoff's work on women's language, Deborah Tannen on conversational style, and the well-replicated finding that women lead most sound change in progress.

Montell's contribution is translation rather than research, and she is clear about that. The value is that the findings reach people who will never open a journal.

It is written in a deliberately casual register with jokes, which some readers find energising and others find grating. The scholarship underneath is sound even where the delivery is loose.

The focus is almost entirely English and largely American, so claims about "language" should be read as claims about one language in one place.

Sound scholarship in a deliberately unserious voice, and the voice is the thing people argue about.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Her opening evidence is lexical: English contains vastly more derogatory terms for women than for men, and words that began as neutral or elevated have repeatedly drifted downward when applied to women. The pattern is documented in historical linguistics and is one of the book's firmest foundations.

Montell attacks the advice industry telling women to stop apologising, stop hedging and lower their voices, pointing out that the features criticised are frequently signs of linguistic innovation — women lead most documented sound changes — and that the objection is to the speaker rather than the speech.

Women are not speaking badly. They are speaking first, and being criticised for it.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The specific speech features most frequently mocked turn out to be poor targets for the criticism levelled at them. Creaky voice and rising intonation at the end of statements are both used by men at broadly comparable rates without attracting any comment at all, which strongly suggests that the complaint being made is not really an acoustic one. Montell treats the policing itself as the phenomenon worth studying.

A substantial section examines how slurs are taken over by the groups they target, when this works and when it does not, and what determines whether a reclaimed word can be used by outsiders. She is clear that reclamation is a group-level process that individuals cannot perform unilaterally.

The chapters on pronouns cover the long and well-documented history of prescriptive grammarians imposing the masculine generic on a language whose ordinary speakers had been using singular they for centuries before anyone objected. It is a useful corrective to the widespread assumption that gender-neutral usage is a recent departure from rules that were once settled; the rule was the departure.

It is popular linguistics written to be entertaining, and the jokey register occasionally arrives at exactly the point where a citation would have served the argument better. The evidence base is largely secondary rather than drawn from her own research, the focus is overwhelmingly on English and on American usage within it, and specialists will find the treatment of several live debates compressed to the point of simplification.

Its most durable effect is on how you hear criticism of the way other people speak. Once the pattern is visible, objections framed as concern for clarity, professionalism or standards turn out with some regularity to be objections to who is doing the talking rather than to anything about the talking itself. That observation transfers well beyond gender, to accent, class and dialect.