ABSTRACT
The power of discourse in facilitating and maintaining discrimination against ‘members’ of ‘groups’ is tremendous. Language provides names for categories, and so helps to set their boundaries and relationships; and discourse allows these names to be spoken and written frequently, so contributing to the apparent reality and currency of the categories. This chapter looks at lexical instruments of categorization and discrimination such as these, but it is important to stress at this point that it is not only vocabulary which contributes to the reproduction of discrimination in discourse. The chapter offers some illustration and analysis of the representation of women in the newspapers. It accepts the general claim that linguistic usage is sexist, responding to the ideological paradigms in discourse which assign women special, deviant status in certain respects. There is no doubt that, with or without the coincidence or timing of its publication, many people would find it seriously offensive, tasteless and crude.
