When 'Slut' Just Won't Do

Let me hasten to add I'm not calling anyone a slut, just enjoying the fact that Josh Marshall seems to have come up with a new term for what he endearingly calls "serially sexually questing women."

For those not paying attention to politics, two South Carolina men set aside their manners and Southern charm to claim they had had sex with Republican gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley.

Marshall, having already identified the Mark Sanford neologism "hiking the Appalachian Trail" to cover for an affair, says he'd be honored to be credited with inventing "manizer."

That takes us to Language Log, who writes, "there's a lexical lacuna here.  A male politician who is prone to out-of-wedlock hookups would be called a womanizer, but there seems to be no appropriate equivalent for a female. The term slut, for example, has connotations that are entirely inappropriate for a case of this kind. So Josh's attempt to coin manizer is an entirely rational move, though I'm not sure it will catch on."

And so we get, once again, to the very different attitudes toward the sexual behavior of men or women. At another time, I might have gone off on a harangue. Tonight, it's an interesting point of language.

But I do get to use the "sex" tag for this posting.