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| | Household Words: Bloomers, sucker, bombshell, scab, nigger, cyber by Stephanie A. Smith | PopMatters Book Review |
 | | The meaning of a word can seem like a straightforward thing, but a word is in fact a battleground on which opposing ideologies clash, with the status and reputation of various groups -- women, racial groups, social classes -- at stake. |
 | | That premise, a hallmark of postmodernist theories that hold reality to be primarily constructed by language use, is the basis for English professor Stephanie A. Smith's study of six individual words coined in America and, in her estimation, redolent of currents in American history: bloomers, sucker, bombshell, scab, nigger, and cyber. |
 | | Though she must occasionally loop back to defend her methodology and argue for the word's agency in affecting the history its changing meaning merely recorded, the chapter nonetheless affords readers a tangible way of conceptualizing how feminism is resisted at the level of word usage. |
| www.popmatters.com /books/reviews/h/household-words-bloomers.shtml (1459 words) |
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