From New York City, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language, I'm John McWhorter,

and we're going to do a show this time that I've been thinking about for a while.

Some of you often ask about it.

I realize, as I often do, that it really is something that we need to talk about because

it's both more difficult and easier than it seems to understand.

That is gender, and no, I don't mean the rather complex and often loaded way that we talk

about it in terms of society, but I mean more locally, gender in languages.

And for an English speaker, it is the challenge of, for example, approaching French or Spanish,

which are often the first foreign languages that we're exposed to if we speak English.

You find that for some reason, all nouns are divided between being, for example, masculine

and feminine.

You can't quite understand why.

And we have to make a very important differentiation here.

This is something you'll learn about in linguistics.

I don't mean easy gender.

I mean dumb, dumb, gender.

So there's a difference between gender that actually makes sense because you're talking

about, for example, boys and girls or men and women.

I don't mean gender like in Spanish where you're talking about a little cat, and if it's

a boy, it's a gatito, and if it's a girl, it's a gatita.

Oh, for something that shaves and ah, for something that does not shave its face, something

like that.

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