Demonised
Draftee
- May 31, 2014
- 16
- 37
- AFL Club
- Melbourne
Pinker is a deep thinker. Would have to be an MFC supporter.For those interested in the partner vs girlfriend terminological debate, Steven Pinker wrote about this phenomenon in "The Stuff of Thought". Basically, due to accidents of history or human psychology, we're often left with an absence of appropriate words that would pick out very definite or useful concepts that we would otherwise expect to exist. In this case of the concept of "a person with whom I'm in a serious, monogamous relationship, but to whom I'm not yet married", the words we use to denote it are either too casual ("boyfriend" / "girlfriend"), too sterile or legalistic ("partner"), or just plain ridiculous ("paramour"). A particular reason for this may be the fact that, historically, pre-marital relationships were either delegitimised or stigmatised, meaning there was never the opportunity for a word without inappropriate connotations to arise in the English speaking world as a neutral signifier of this concept.
A similar lexical gap arose, for what it's worth, due to our squeamishness about excrement. Owing to its stigma in polite society, we don't have a neutral word to denote this concept that is not childish in connotation ("poo"), clinical in connotation ("faeces" / "excrement") or vulgar in connotation ("Carlton FC").