The Sandlot is the greatest baseball movie ever made.
It’s about a group of boys during one spectacular summer - going to the pool, watching 4th of July fireworks, playing baseball, always playing baseball. Innocence and the magic of childhood are the lightning in the bottle that makes the movie so wonderful. But, the reason I bring it up is because of one particular scene. Here, minute 1:25:
“You play ball like a girl.” Oh. Oh, damn. Them’s fighting words.
I didn’t grow up in the era of the Sandlot. It’s set in 1962. But two decades later the insults and pejoratives of that era still rang true. Being accused of doing anything “like a girl” could destroy your reputation. Your had to fight back. And the word we used most often was sissy.
Sissy is an odd word. On the one hand, it’s just your sister. Or maybe not even your sister. Sissy might be a grandmother, or an aunt who is particularly close. She might even just be a family friend. And, for a lot of women, Sissy is an actual name. It’s the diminutive form of several including Priscilla and Cecilia. But. On the other hand, sissy is well, a sissy.
A wimp. A loser. Most importantly, a sissy wasn’t manly. A sissy didn’t know how to do things the right way, or they cried at the wrong things, or they liked the wrong things, or they moved wrong, or talked wrong, or, or, or…anything could make you a sissy. Anything you did that stood out as different from the rest of the boys made you a sissy.
Or, as Wikipedia puts it:
a pejorative term for a boy or man who does not demonstrate masculine traits, and shows possible signs of fragility. Generally, sissy implies a lack of courage, strength, athleticism, coordination, testosterone, male libido, and stoicism, all of which have typically been associated with masculinity and considered important to the male role in Western society.
(The rest of the article is well worth reading; the editors who wrote the article delve into gender studies, modern alternative vocabulary, the use of the word in sexual subcultures, and several other branchings I don’t have space to get into here. It is remarkably comprehensive and a cut above the standard Wikipedia article.)
In third grade two of my classmates got into a fight after school. One of the boys had stolen some marbles from the other one. The second boy, let’s call him Brian, took his marbles back and that was the end of it as far as he was concerned. But the first boy, let’s call him Luis, said Brian was a sissy because he couldn’t take a joke. Brian, who, up until that point had never shown any anger at anyone, beat the snot out of Luis. It was the talk of the school for days.
But how did we know that sissy was such a damning word? After all, it wasn’t a swear word. You could say it in front of Mom and Dad without getting in trouble, especially if you changed the context a little. The handles above the doors in Mom’s car? Sissy-bars. Putting a band-aid on your knee after you fell off your skateboard? Sissy move. How come you don’t want to wear your new pants? Don’t want to look like a sissy.
So, how did we know? It was in our stories. Remember the Wizard of Oz? The Cowardly Lion sings:
Yeh, it’s sad, believe me, Missy
When you’re born to be a sissy
Without the vim and verve
But more importantly, it showed up in The Hardy Boys and Archie Comics and in Saturday morning cartoons. So, yeah, we knew what it meant. Kinda.
By the time I got to junior high school, in 1987, sissy had taken on a new context, one described eloquently in Jonathon Green’s Dictionary of Slang:
homosexual; pertaining to the world of male homosexuality; thus sissification n., the act of making something homosexual
And thus it joined the ranks of our more adult insults, to join a host of other words employed to indicate that one was effeminate, gay, or both. Interestingly, this dual usage of sissy - as sister and as pejorative - go back an equally long time. Green’s Dictionary traces the pejorative use back to 1882, while the Corpus of Historical American English fills its earliest results with usages as a diminutive and as a term of endearment dating back to the 1850s.
In modern times, however, as the conversation around the pejorative use, in particular how insulting it is to women, has come into the zeitgeist, its popularity as a name or nickname has declined rapidly. According to baby name website The Bump, at its peak in 1981, Sissy ranked #4,997 in popularity but by 2012 that rank had dropped to #29,162. So, yeah, not quite as popular as it was.
Language and its usages change fast. By the time I graduated college in 1998, sissy had already been thoroughly disavowed as a pejorative. It had always been a playground insult (as opposed to a grown-up insult which would involve words you were not allowed to say on television) but as the conversations around masculinity and homosexuality steered us towards more inclusive language and more acceptance in general, sissy became a word that you just didn’t say. It didn’t matter how angry you were, attacking someone by belittling their masculinity only weakened your own position. Which is more than fine, frankly. We have more than enough ways to wound each other, we can afford to take a few off the table.
That said, I don’t know if it’s possible for sissy to make a resurgence. I don’t even know if it should. Sis, the even shorter and, if possible, more affectionate form of sister is making new inroads and pathways through Millennial and Gen Z slang1. And maybe sis is word enough to encompass the affectionate aspects of sissy without any of the pejorative.
The Pitch
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What We’re Reading
Normally, this is where I’d mention a book I’m reading or interested in, but, uhh, I’m behind in my reading. So, until I get caught up, maybe next month, maybe in ten years, I’m going to take a different tack and recommend something I’ve been following more closely than perhaps I should:
Speaking of Jonathon Green’s Dictionary of Slang, he has just published a large update and his write-up, on his SubStack, is a fascinating look at lexicography in real time. If you’re into words, and if you’re reading MY SubStack I hope you are, then you’ll enjoy Green’s notes about how and why he does what he does. It’s a deep, niche read, but a fascinating one.
It feels like everyone address everyone else on Tik Tok as “hey sis…” almost as a replacement for the now ancient “hey besties…”