FTR I don’t see “Dude” as gender-neutral, I see it as just another example of using male as the default for everyone (similar to Man, Guy) and then declaring by fiat that that means it’s gender-neutral. And sure, lots of women go along with that, for various reasons. But that doesn’t mean it’s actually gender-neutral. Just that the patriarchy is a big gorilla.
Is it “by fiat”, or is it the result of the natural evolution of common usage? Aren’t language purists always being lectured that at any given time language means precisely what it’s commonly understood to mean, regardless of digression from prior historical meanings (or sometimes, even flipping to a completely opposite meaning)?
“Natural” evolution under patriarchy is an explicitly gendered exercise with a distinct power imbalance, so distinction without a difference.
I’m not privileging the historic meaning here. I’m noting how the “neutral” version came about, and it wasn’t by women insisting on being called “dude”. It was by dudes using it for women whether they wanted or no.
I think you misunderstand where my objection lies. I’m not saying those who use it don’t think it’s gender-neutral. I’m saying they’re lying to themselves about its gender neutrality.
Good thing, too. If it had come about by anyone “insisting” on anything, that would be an example of language being changed “by fiat”. It came about through the natural evolution of language, much the same as “guys” becoming gender-neutral in many contexts, and by women not objecting and in fact frequently engaging in the same gender-neutral usage.
No, I think your objection is misplaced.
However, I think this is another silly digression and I’ve no more to say on it.
The whole thing is complicated, but it’s worth noting that there’s a lot of assumption packed into this statement. Yes, a male-centric/patriarchal culture is likely the reason for male-gendered words serving also as gender-neutral words (whether they started as gender neutral and evolved to also mean the specific, like “man”, or the opposite, like “dude”). But the implication that women by-in-large sat silently fuming and unable to resist when the men around them unilaterally decided to impose their incorrectly gendered word “dude” on them … well, that’s one way to extend a narrative about the abuses women suffer at the hands of men, but I don’t know that it’s supported by any facts.
What? No. That’s not what “by fiat” means. E.g. when women asked to be called Ms rather than Mrs/Miss that was asking for an accomodation, not decreeing it to be so.
“Guys” is exactly the same as “dudes”, just further along.
Gosh, that must mean they’re all cool with it, right? Women never just silently go along with what men want (or play the “just one of the guys, not like those other girls” game). /s
Didn’t say that. Women are as much part of the patriarchal system as men, and as likely to buy into its precepts as men are. Internalized sexism is a thing.
What I do know is that there are women who do object, though. And not silently. Just like there are women who do think it is gender-neutral (see second cite). I think it’s clear I agree with the former, not the latter.
Fair enough, and that all makes sense. But I do think that my take on your post is a reasonable understanding of “ It was by dudes using it for women whether they wanted or no.”
It’s ok for folks to not like the word without creating a “men forced this on unwilling women” narrative to justify it.
Sure. I can see how that interpretation is reasonable. But I have hopefully corrected that now.
I’m calling it like I see it, not creating a narrative out of thin air. IME, we men tend to be blissfully unaware of our privilege and how expansive it is. We have manspread across the language like it was our own personal subway car.
I know I generally have been unaware, even though I move in circles that are more concerned with this sort of thing than the average, and where speaking this kind of truth is encouraged.
It took more than one person pointing out the underlying skewed framework to get me to stop saying “dude” and “guys” to everyone, and that, only recently. I try and be better.
I’m just going to pop in long enough to say that what you characterize as “asking for an accommodation” is in practice precisely an example of some group “insisting” on a language change. Since there is no dictatorial authority governing the use of the English language (except in specific narrow instances like publication style guides or company policy) this type of insistence, and the social pressures it creates for conformance, is effectively, in practice, language change through the dictates of fiat, as distinctly opposed to language change that occurs through no outside pressures but simply as a result of naturally shifting meanings and preferences.
This is not to say that such directed language changes are necessarily bad; “Ms.” is just fine because a woman’s marital status isn’t something that needs to be broadcast to the world every time she utters her name. But in general, such forced changes tend to be at high risk of being ill-conceived and counterproductive, and sometimes unintentionally humourous to those of us who care about language, as for instance in some of the examples cited in the thread “The shifting tides of racist language”.
I think to me getting to do things by “fiat” implies you’re the group with the power.
And I guess I don’t see patriarchal dictat as any more “natural” than any counter-pushes. In fact, I’d say thinking patriarchal forces are the natural order is a big part of the problem.
Also, this is the Pit, so a mild “screw you, guy” for implying your side of this are the only ones “who care about language”.
My daughter calls everyone “bruh” regardless of gender. That’s what young people do now.
Imagine the shitshow that would result on this board, where some posters are a bit slow to catch up on modern usage of terms they cling to with outdated and obsolete sensibilities, as if everything is set in stone.
Some young people. My daughters have never said “bruh” in their lives. And their awareness of the preferences of their gender-non-conforming friends keeps it that way.
Patriarchy, it’s sooo modern. 
When we were kids, my sister would say *Oh, woman!" and “Oh, sister!” instead of the usual exclamations.
Lol, I wake up because I have a 5am call with Chirag and there’s 20 posts, some of them with the most convoluted logic to defend a word which itself is so incidental to the English tongue that, if it slid into non-usage, we already have five other gendered replacements ready to go. Right, buddies?
To me, pronoun usage and gendered language identifiers are pretty simple to figure out when and how to use:
- Preferred.
- Gendered, if gender (or preference) is known.
- Neutral.
When I first emailed Chirag I didn’t use gendered language. It was easy to do because I know the English tongue and can write sentences using proper names & the words you/they/them. It wasn’t until after I found out his gender, that I used gendered pronouns.
Again: not that difficult. But some of y’all just fight this bit of courtesy to a degree I find shocking. And distressing, given how manufactured all this pronoun-outrage is in the first place.
I’ve been here off and on for awhile. I’ve unpopular opinions, am thin-skinned, and lazy (don’t want to bother looking up Reputable Sources and citing them). A lot of times the general tone of the Dope makes me very stabby.
I’ve learned, slowly and painfully, to (mostly) stop making statements of fact that I can’t or won’t back up, particularly if they are “of substance” meaning they are going to raise some people’s hackles. I have learned how to post without personally insulting other posters. I’ve learned to roll my eyes and bow out when I am on occasion shouted down by jerks, and not even think about it again.
All of these personal improvements are the result of working with the challenging and often abrasive tone of the Dope which nevertheless I find has enough fairness to make continuing worthwhile. I have not found many other discussion groups like this; they are either overprotective (I’ve been officially warned on one board for politely asking a poster to use punctuation – any punctuation whatsoever), or a nasty free-for-all that drives everyone except the oblivious and the aggressive away. It is HARD to find a balance, and I commend the moderators for being so assiduous in their efforts.
The Dope was a LOT worse not long ago – horrendously and blithely misogynist, for one major thing – and it’s been cleaned up quite a bit. There will always be jerks, and they will constantly need to be tamped down. Having been an admin on another board, I can say that those who are not moderators have no idea how nasty this board would instantly become without constant behind the scenes policing. No fucking idea.
I’d leave out number 2. All too often, you might think you know the gender. If you know the person’s preference, sure, use it. Otherwise i think it’s best to stick to gender neutral statements. Unless your “gender neutral” language is always male, which is certainly what i grew up with, and is still pretty common.
(Confession: i fuck up pronouns all the time. I have a lot of trans and non-binary friends, many of whom came out after i met them. I probably get corrected for using the wrong gender most weeks. The more i can avoid using gender at all, the less likely i am to irritate a friend with that post on the group discord. I am trying very hard to train myself to avoid gender when it’s not needed.
By the way, despite my misgendering people, I’m still friends with all these people. Accidental misgendering isn’t some horrible sin. It’s like being clumsy and bumping into people. It’s annoying to the person affected, of course. It’s something to attempt to avoid of course. But no one thinks you are a horrible person so long as you try.)
I suspect there’s a gender component to it, where folks assume women aren’t as good at stuff because our culture is awful.
There’s also an arcane arts component. If you’re doing something that I have no idea how to do or even how to judge, I’m likely to trust your judgment of the field over my own. Show me a bit of Python code and tell me it was simple to write, and I’ll believe you; show me a bit and say it was horrendously complicated to write, and I’ll also believe you. Absent evidence to the contrary, puzzlegal, I’m going to believe you when you tell me whether you’re good at puzzles, because I don’t have any way to form that judgment independently.
And there’s also a showbiz component. For different types of performances, different levels of audience-expectation management is appropriate. When I do magic tricks for kids, I often pretend I don’t know what I’m doing, because it adjusts expectations downward, making the big reveal even better. When I go to the Renn Faire and watch the fire-eaters, they go on and on about how difficult the trick they’re doing is, because otherwise people might realize that lighting your nipple on fire isn’t actually all that hard to do (spoiler: burning alcohol doesn’t transfer heat very quickly). Some thirty years ago when I saw the Flying Brothers Karamazov perform their juggling act, they made a huge deal about the danger of their tricks. I figured there was some element of self-serving bullshit involved, but that was part of the fun. Jugglers who tell the audience that they’re great jugglers are engaging in performance.
And maybe that’s the key: declaring one’s positive character traits is somewhat performative. If someone is declaring their virtues outside of an entertainment setting, I’m going to wonder why they think it’s necessary.
Also, using gender-neutral pronouns for a person is never misgendering them, any more than using “Ms” implies a woman is divorced. Yes, there’s a class of people badly served by gendered pronouns who almost always prefer neutral ones. But no, it’s not rude to refer to a woman whose martial status you don’t know as “Ms”, nor is it rude to use E or they pronouns to refer to a person whose gender you aren’t certain of.
Of course, if a woman says, “i really prefer Mrs.”, or a man says he really really prefers “he”, it’s polite to follow their preference.
It’s fortunate, then, that I never thought and never said that “patriarchal forces are the natural order”. And ISTM that throwing around this “patriarchy” tangent is both ridiculous and totally misses my point.
First of all, this is not 1950, it’s the 23rd (or 24th, if you prefer) year of the 21st century. Women today run businesses, they work as journalists and editors in traditional and in new media, they write opinions as issue advocates, they write opinions as judges, and they are all over social media. The idea that men constitute a patriarchal power base that controls the English language is beyond ludicrous. Whatever element of truth this idea may once have held is at least half a century out of date.
The point that I’m making – and the distinction that I’m drawing – is between language change that arises as the result of undirected evolution such as gradual shifts in meaning of words and phrases, and language change that is directed by vested interests that is, in effect, a form of artificial language engineering. I stress that the latter is often beneficial and almost always well-intentioned, but IMHO we tend to do it to excess, with results that sometimes sound stilted and even unintentionally funny.
One of the discussions in the other thread I mentioned, for example, was about how it was allegedly problematic to refer to a product with intentionally degraded functionality as having been “crippled”. It’s common practice in the tech industry to have several versions of the exact same product, but one intended to sell at a lower cost having had some features intentionally disabled. The word “crippled” is the perfect, succinct description of such a product compared to its more expensive counterpart and has been an industry term since forever. What am I supposed to call it now, a “differently-abled” phone or printer? I mean, certainly there are other, less succinct, ways to word the concept, but the idea that a person with disabilities would be offended by the use of the word “crippled” to refer to an IBM line printer strikes me as absurd.
It’s a well-meaning attempt to do nothing less than wipe the word from the English language, which seems to me to be both silly on one hand, and little bit Orwellian on the other. The Orwellian aspect is the idea that by eliminating allegedly “harmful” words from the language, we can also control the ability to formulate the associated harmful thoughts, and so we all become more virtuous and docile subjects of Big Brother. I think it’s possible to acknowledge that some words, primarily those that are blatantly and indisputably offensive, are inappropriate in normal polite discourse (or in some cases, in any discourse at all) without throwing open the sluice gates to a tsunami of Orwellian language engineering.
Then let me rephrase:
“… in general, such forced changes tend to be at high risk of being ill-conceived and counterproductive, and sometimes unintentionally humourous to those of us who tend to be conservative about artificially imposed changes to language.”
I get your point, and I agree that generally the board needs that kind of policing. But I’m going to push back a little bit by pointing out that we don’t have to speculate what would happen here without it, because right here we have the Pit, which is, by design, a forum with very little policing.
Not trying to argue with you, I just want to humbly defend the Pit, because I think it serves useful purposes. There are certainly elements of nastiness here, but there are also perfectly civil discussions like this one and many others like it, the only difference from the rest of the board being the ability to speak more freely which some of us actually find refreshing. It certainly hasn’t turned into a cesspool of all-around nastiness as you seem to imply would happen, and I’d respectfully point out that you yourself find the Pit useful enough that you obviously read it and have posted in it at least a dozen times.
Honest question…
WTF is “E”?
Really asking.
Not too long ago I got busted for not knowing a word was “bad” and here I am again not knowing a word (worse…a letter) that may be fraught with problems.
Is there a list of these words/phrases/letters we are all supposed to refer to?
If this is too much a hijack let me know and I will start another thread.