Kingsley Amis on Womanese

Kingsley Amis's manual on English is a perverse delight—even for women.
See Kingsley Amis, The King's English (1997), pp. 244-45:

Womanese
It has long been noticed, by members of both sexes in their different ways, that men and women speak discrete languages, or more precisely they speak closely related variants of a single language. Each variant is well enough understood across the sexual divide, but attempts to treat the two as one are as unproductive as any other chimera about the essential sameness of men and women. The word *reasonable*, to take a familiar case, changes meaning with the sex of its user. So a wife might say of her husband that it was not reasonable of him to expect her to be reasonable on some stated occasion and be understood, not as one making a mildly cynical, moderately impartial, worldly-wise remark on a difference between the two sexes, but as putting forward a serious, valid complaint about typical male insensitivity -- putting it to another female, naturally.

No doubt I have already come too far to be safe. I had better take refuge behind the rock-hard factual observation that, unlike most men, women are always getting set phrases wrong. This propensity of theirs was noted at least as far back as the works of Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), if not much further in the character of Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan's _The Rivals_ of 1775, whose nice derangement of epitaphs may have struck many auditors as not close enough for discomfort but never, surely, as being put into the mouth or a character of the wrong sex. It is worth noting not only as required but also as accurate that Mrs. Malaprop's mistakes are nearly enough on target to be, like so many of this type, inners rather than outers or hopeless misses. You can always guess at once at what she nearly said.

My ignorance of foreign languages is far too deep for me even to conjecture what female behaviour there might be. The novels and stories of Peter DeVries, however, from _Tunnel of Love_ (1954) onwards, make it clear that such divergences or variations (or whatever one is to call them) of self-expression thrive in the land of the free. There and only there, possibly, could a wife have said to a husband in reference to some third party, 'No, you're wrong, he's not a profound character, at least only on the surface. Deep down he's shallow.' This is perhaps not exactly a malapropism but that it is a specimen of womanese will be doubted by no normal male who has talked to a normal female for more than five minutes. Such a one will, if he is any good, have seen that examples of womanese and of how men respond to them capture a pair of truths about the sexes in a way that no discourse in run-of-the-mill English could.

So to our own time and place. I fill out this pioneering study by reproducing a string of such cases as listed in a novel of 1995. Note the wide range of styles ventured into. All phrases quoted are warranted truthful instances of womanese, presented flat. *Vicious snowball. Quicksand wit. Up gum street. Beyond contempt. On its death legs. Hubbub of activity. When it came down to the crunch. Greaseboat. He lost his top* and *she blew her rag*. And *I was talking aloud* -- once, just once, but once.

It is not extraordinary that the extraterrestial origin of women was a recurrent theme of science fiction, though I have never seen their imperfect grasp of their native language as one more piece of evidence.