Word: femina
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...WOMEN HUMAN?, Dorothy L. Sayers notes that Latin, which helped shape Western thought, provided two words for "man"--homo, meaning person or being, and vir. referring to the sexual side. For women there was only one word, femina. It carried the second, sexual sense; no way existed for referring to a woman merely as a person. French has preserved but varied the gap; the only formal words for female people are those which also mean "daughter" or "wife," In English, as it happens, we lack such an immediate, glaring linguistic wrong. But that happenstance merely makes the gap more difficult...
...French have long been celebrated for their enthusiastic worship of The Woman--the femina who is perfect, whose beauty and sex rating is sky-high. The petty irritation of what happens on their streets inevitably reflects that. But it also holds up a focusing lens to something we in this country are unable to perceive clearly from where we stand. We live with the same assumption, more wavery and ungraspable but just as deep-rooted, that separates women from people...
During the 1960s and '70s the most creative and persuasive advertising poured Dout of the small, freewheeling agencies known as ad boutiques, like Carl Ally or Delia Femina, Travisano & Partners. Gucci-shod zanies in tinted glasses and with-it jargon dreamed up "the white wine that goes with any dish" for Blue Nun and Braniff's pastel-colored jets and Pucci-clad stewardesses. But these days the modest shops along Madison Avenue are once again the big agencies. Says Ed McCabe, president of the onetime boutique Scali, McCabe, Sloves "The giants are doing more good work than ever...