Unaccountably, people have begun to pronounce women ‘women’, if you see what I mean. For centuries we’ve been pronouncing it ‘wimmin’. The new version has the first syllable rhyming with room and the second like men. I heard that Green MP Caroline Lucas say it when addressing a committee at Westminster. What makes it all the odder is that some feminists had in the past 30 or 40 years adopted the spelling wimmin because it did not include the element –men. Its pronunciation didn’t include the element ‘men’, but now it is being made to.
In origin, woman does not come from womb-man, but from wife-man. In that compound, man meant a human of either sex, and wife meant ‘woman’ (in the sense of Latin mulier), not ‘mate’ (Latin uxor). The uxor sense for wife came in later, though the former meaning persisted: a fishwife is not married to a fish.
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