28-05-2007, 08:16 AM
Phylogynist
If you consider that the opposite of misogynist, woman-hater, is a lover of women, the only one given in most books of synonyms and antonyms is feminist, which doesn’t meet the need at all. If you split the Greek word into its constituent parts, you find it is made up of "miso" (a prefix meaning "hate" that turns up in English in a number of rare or facetious words, including misocapnist for a hater of tobacco smoke,) plus "gyn" (meaning "woman", as in gynaecologist,) plus the "ist" ending that indicates an agent noun. So we can replace the first element with "philo" ("love") to get "philogynist" instead. This is listed in most larger dictionaries, with the abstract noun given as "philogyny", love of women. The first citation given in the Oxford English Dictionary is from T H Huxley’s Lay Sermons of 1865.
But one could argue that there’s another way to look at the opposite of misogynist: not a woman-lover, but a man-hater. The latter could be Greeked as "misandronist", using "andro" for man. It’s very rare, but there are a couple of examples in online messages. It seems to be from the more extreme end of the feminist spectrum. However, some say misandronist, if it means anything, means someone who is against the idea of there being rooms or clubs reserved for men, which is derived from "andron", the men’s room in an ancient Greek house, into which women could not go. So that’s a potentially useful word, but not the one we were looking for. A better modern Greek term for a man-hater is "misandrist", though it’s hardly common and appears in only a few dictionaries, with the noun for the concept being, as you’d expect, "misandry".
Philogynist and misandrist are thus the best choices.
This most interesting piece was written by Michael Quinion from World Wide Words. Mr. Quinion writes on International English from a British viewpoint.
Roddie
If you consider that the opposite of misogynist, woman-hater, is a lover of women, the only one given in most books of synonyms and antonyms is feminist, which doesn’t meet the need at all. If you split the Greek word into its constituent parts, you find it is made up of "miso" (a prefix meaning "hate" that turns up in English in a number of rare or facetious words, including misocapnist for a hater of tobacco smoke,) plus "gyn" (meaning "woman", as in gynaecologist,) plus the "ist" ending that indicates an agent noun. So we can replace the first element with "philo" ("love") to get "philogynist" instead. This is listed in most larger dictionaries, with the abstract noun given as "philogyny", love of women. The first citation given in the Oxford English Dictionary is from T H Huxley’s Lay Sermons of 1865.
But one could argue that there’s another way to look at the opposite of misogynist: not a woman-lover, but a man-hater. The latter could be Greeked as "misandronist", using "andro" for man. It’s very rare, but there are a couple of examples in online messages. It seems to be from the more extreme end of the feminist spectrum. However, some say misandronist, if it means anything, means someone who is against the idea of there being rooms or clubs reserved for men, which is derived from "andron", the men’s room in an ancient Greek house, into which women could not go. So that’s a potentially useful word, but not the one we were looking for. A better modern Greek term for a man-hater is "misandrist", though it’s hardly common and appears in only a few dictionaries, with the noun for the concept being, as you’d expect, "misandry".
Philogynist and misandrist are thus the best choices.
This most interesting piece was written by Michael Quinion from World Wide Words. Mr. Quinion writes on International English from a British viewpoint.
Roddie