Although Mr. Garg presents “tabby” as a “word with many unrelated meanings” and suggests the meanings for females derive from the name Tabitha, I’m suspicious. It’s all too common for women to be associated with animals (for example, think “bitch,” going all the way back to Semonides, not to mention the rest of his entire catalog of women based on animal-types). We have been taught to think of cats as quintessentially feminine: we remember the “cat on a hot tin roof” and have learned that women are “catty” and possess a “pussy.” In a more than $1 billion global business, the Japanese have marketed “Hello Kitty” products to girls and young women. (In 2010 Bank of America brought out a Hello Kitty debit card to teach girls 10-15 years old “to learn great money-management skills.” ) Thus, it seems more likely that the word “tabby” derived its application to females as the result of all too familiar and dehumanizing associations.

What struck me especially, though, was the uncommented use of the term “spinster,” a word I had thought would be characterized by now as dated or derogatory. But when I looked it up in my American Heritage Dictionary (copyright 1985-91, it’s the “revised edition” of the 1976 version), it was similarly listed without any suggestion that it had become outmoded or offensive in meaning: a spinster is “1. A woman who has remained single beyond the conventional age for marrying; 2. An unmarried woman; 3. A woman whose occupation is spinning.” Additional terms were listed but not defined: “spinsterhood,” “spinsterish.” Apparently the negative associations with “spinster” were assumed to be commonly held and understood. Even worse, when I looked up “tabby” in the same dictionary, the meanings included “old maid,” and “a prying woman; gossip.”

I am happy to report, however, that both the Oxford American Dictionary (Version 1.0.2, Copyright Apple Computer 2005) that is part of my software and the dictionary that is part of my Microsoft Office 2008 suite are more enlightened. They inform us that the term “spinster” should be regarded as “derogatory” or “offensive” and “dated”; even the female occupational spinner of yarn has become “archaic.”

(For more, see my blog on this topic: "Of Words and Women: Dictionaries and their Discontents" at
http://www.fembio.org/biographie.php/fra...ir-discontents/

Cheers, RJH