Women and Language

I’m “just” saying - qualifiers and seeking approval undermines female speech

As I work on my novel Remnant, I am using the “find/replace” feature in new ways. With different dialects in the novel, including slave dialect, I wanted to make sure all the instances of “just” were written as ‘jes and not ‘jus. So I did a “find” command with “just” and was shocked at what I saw. In my 400+ page manuscript, there were over 250 uses of “just.” Some of them were appropriate, but in many cases, the word was used by female characters and it undermined or undervalued their speech. 

Sometimes “just” can be replaced with “only,” “simply,” “recently,” or “barely.” Often it is not needed at all - similar to “that,” a word I encourage my students to delete whenever possible. We use “just” and other words like it to soften our speech so we don’t seem so demanding. For instance, “can I just have a cup of coffee?” Or “I just need a moment of your time.” 

I noticed this the last few weeks as I watched Jeopardy. This is a generalization, but I noticed it often enough that I bet a study could be done on how men and women use language to ask for categories on Jeopardy. The men often say “mountains, 200” - in other words, they succinctly say what they want using a shortened form of the category and the amount. On the other hand, women often use qualifiers and say “may I have mountains for 200, please?” They are more polite, but they tend to ask permission more instead of stating what they want.

As I reviewed all the instances of the use of “just” in my novel, I had to make decisions about why the character used that word, if it were appropriate, and if I could either delete it or use a synonym. Take this sentence in the novel: “No, just my papa and his sister were kidnapped.” As I read it again, I wondered how I could use “just” to describe something as heinous as a kidnapping into slavery. It seems glaringly inappropriate at a second glance. Or how about this dialogue? “Don’t worry about my hair.  I can just pin it up.  You have a lot to do.” Here the character is meek and apologetic. Does that fit the personality of my character at this point in the novel?

Have you found helpful uses for the “find/replace” feature in MS Word? Let me know about them in the comments. I’m just saying…