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"Words not only reflect the culture which uses them, they teach and perpetuate the attitudes which created them." When we first hear the words spoken by a person, an impression of that person is created by us. Whether they speak fluently, with a stutter, with some grammatical error, or accent, our view and overall judgement of them as people, are affected. What is a word then? How can this trivial collection of syllables, a mechanism of communication play such an important role on a person's perception of another person? People come from many places all over the world and each place has their own heritage, and system of words; their own language. Culture is an important factor concerning the way words are spoken and interpreted by people in general. People who converse with each other and have the same culture understand what each other means by their expressions whereas cross-culture conversation leads to many misinterpretations and implications for both participants. Words have value attached to them, and it is this value, this underlying meaning that is conveyed to people in conversation, depending on their diction; and who it is spoken to. It is these meanings attached to words that cause them to change meaning over time, perpetuating the teachings of the attitude that created them in the first place. To properly justify this, with references to Deborah Tannen's 'You just Don't Understand' , Shakespeare's 'Twelfth Night' and Dale Spender's 'Man Made Language', an exploration of how words function in society and language follows. Words and gender have many things in common; there are two genders, each with their own word: Masculine for males and Feminine for females. On this basis of gender are other words formed, solely to serve the purpose of distinguished between the sexes, but how closely has this system served its purpose? Could it be that the main attitude in creating this division was to segregate male from female? The word female suggests that the thing, being, object associated with that word is something deviant from male, noting the negating prefix 'fe-', so the male gender, or more so the masculine gender already gets a positive light, an image of approval - all interpreted through the way the word is written and pronounced. So, in conjunction with the earlier musing, the stigma attached to the words 'male' and 'masculinity' already carried meaning and commands some sort of reaction from a person. Up until now, words and language were only created and at the disposal of men, women were not allowed to handle language or influence it in any way. So it would be correct to state that words were created by men, and the meanings associated with these words were also determined by men. Hence, a possible reason for the differing implications or perceptions the word 'male' as opposed to 'female' commands.
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