Encodings were precious. The little girls heard the stories at their mother’s knees, when their mothers had time to tell them…. How women, in the long ago time when women could vote and be doctors and fly spaceships—a fantasy world for these girlchildren, as fabulous and glittering as any tale of castles and dragons—how women, even then, had begun the first slow gropings toward a language of their own.
    The tales were told again and again, and embroidered lovingly with detail; and prominent in their ornament were the jewels of the Encodings. A word for a perception that had never had a word of its own before.... [Encodings were] precious because they were truly newborn to the universe of discourse.... “A woman who gives an Encoding to other women is a woman of valor, and all women are in her debt forevermore.”

61. Native Tongue.

The Spouter-Inn Suzette Haden Elgin's feminist science-fiction novel Native Tongue. More episodes

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Show Notes.