I hate feminists. I also hate illiterate motherfuckers who don’t understand the way the English language works and want to bastardize it for the sake of their liberal feminist agenda.
Let me clue you into a fact. In English, when the gender is not known, the masculine is used. This is proper god damned English, just like the use of the masculine in Spanish when the gender is not specified.
I’m all for women’s rights to equal treatment in society but when you start bastardizing the English language for your little “Grrrrl Power” crusade, I start wondering if maybe the world wouldn’t be a better place if we went back to the “barefoot and pregnant” ideology. :rolleyes:
Feminism Ate My Balls!!! :eek:
P.S. Skyhook, what’s a bastage? I couldn’t find it at dictionary.com…
The linked article had a strong whiff of misogyny throughout—“editor-ette”? That said, the author did have a point about the trimming of language to suit contemporary ideas of gender. The phrase “All-American Girl” connotes a unique image that “All-American Woman” does not. Making an editorial change in that context is butchery. Yes, one should eschew sexism, but one should also retain one’s ear for mellifluous language and the idiosyncrasies that constitute the auctorial voice.
That was the veridct of grammarians a generation ago, but it is no longer so cut-and-dried an issue.
Fowler’s Modern English Usage, 3rd ed., says:
Words into Type, 3rd ed., says:
Every style manual I’ve consulted, plus the in-house style guide of my own company, recommends using he or she when referenced by indefinite antecedents. That’s just the way language changes.
Gobear, thank you for at least confirming that once upon a time, I was right.
The quotes you provided chill me to the bone. I shudder when I imagine the year 2102, when “he or she” has morphed into “heshe” and is considered to be a proper english pronoun.
Feminism Ate My Balls And My Penis!!! :eek:
You don’t understand how the English language works. I wish you motherfuckers would take a damn linguistics class just once.
Let me clue you in on a fact. There’s no magic grammar book somewhere that is the True and Proper English Language. Proper English is what people use. That’s it. End of the line, all passengers please watch their step getting off the fucking clue train. Languages change. Is it bastardization that you pronounce words differently than Shakespeare did?
I can just see people like you ranting during the Great Vowel Shift. “Hoose! It’s pronounced hoose you motherfuckers! I don’t live in a goddamned house!!”
(BTW: The descriptivist stance on language only works as far as a good sense of flow will let it. ‘He/she’ or ‘(s)he’ both jar the reader and make it harder to read the text aloud. Therefore, they are only to be used when one must follow an outdated and rather silly rule. Otherwise, use the masculine pronoun, as has been done in the popular vernacular for centuries.)
But is being done less and less now. Also, you don’t have to insert punctuation like that; there are several other options. “He or She”, the use of “they” as a unisex singular pronoun which has been catching on in speech and some writing (my memory’s saying Britain but it lies to me) and alternating he and she between various examples.
This one is best, IMHO. In a short work you may not have more than one generic person, but in anything extensive like a textbook there’s no reason not to, unless you’re, I dunno, writing about operating a penis.
Thank you, gobear, for your articulate response. I was working so hard not to take Anaximenes’ bile personally, that I felt it better to steer away from writing a response.
I can’t promise to be as erudite in my response now, (being a clueless, feminist, illiterate motherfucker, and female to boot - what can we possibly expect?), but here goes…
I guess that should be read as…
“I’m all for women’s rights to equal treatment in society but when you start interfering with my ability to be a chauvinistic, paleolithic, condesending (‘little “Grrrl Power” crusade’) prick…”
Oh wait, feminists ate your balls and your penis. Yes, that does explain a lot, little man.
Jane Austen used “they” as a unisex singular pronoun, although she was of course a loathsome genital-devouring feminist who knew nothing about the English language.
As a writer, I would probably be called a ‘whiny bastard’ much like many here have called the guy who wrote the article in the OP.
I absolutely demand that my writing (particularly poetry) be published exactly as I wrote it or not at all. I don’t let anyone else change it, and I’d sure as hell rather go without money for my work than sacrifice my art to someone else’s PC filter.
As for this whole ‘he or she’ debate, I must be one of the few people on earth who never cared that ‘he’ was used when the gender of the antecedent wasn’t known. It was a simple rule that made writing and reading easier. It didn’t do anything to discourage me in my chosen field (which is engineering) and it sure as hell never entered my mind that there’d be more female engineers if they just stopped using ‘he’ in the textbooks.
I got into engineering for the subject matter at hand, not for the vocabulary choice of textbook authors, and if that had been enough to put me off of engineering, it probably wasn’t something I wanted enough.
There is a gender neutral third person pronoun, however. That word is ‘it’. And if we have to change gender-unknown to something, why not use ‘it’?
Hey, even bloody William Faulkner required an editor! Nobody, not even Stephen King or Tom Clancy, gets published unedited.Substantive editors have to clean up the prose and excise clumsy or unnecessary verbiage, and copy editors have to make sure that the spelling and grammar are correct and that the format, style, names, and so on are correct and consistent. If you write a spy novel and type the Central Intelligence Agency as the CIA, C.I.A., and Cia in three different paragraphs, it’s up to the copy editor to query it. Editors are necessary to clarify the author’s meaning.
And who publishes poetry nowadays?
Sorry, ‘it’ is used only for objects and animals. Steven Pinker covered this topic in his enlightening book, The Language Instinct. Unfortunately, I don’t have a copy at hand to excerpt relevant pasages from.
You missed it, apparently. My work is published exactly as I choose it to be, or it isn’t at all. I have published and sold my own writing so that I could exercise the level of creative freedom that I wanted to. Now, I’m not a publishing house and I don’t have the kind of capital to put out a million copies, but the fact remains that I have the option of publishing and selling my writing to whoever will pay me for it.
And I do it without editors changing my words and the meaning of my writing. Editing my work isn’t just about ‘clarifying’ meaning. Someone else editing it would change the meaning of what I write. It’s not objective material and it’s highly interpretive. An editor’s interpretation of what they thought I should have said encapsulates what that editor thought the writing meant. That’s not necessarily the same thing I had in mind when I wrote it.
I’m well aware that ‘it’ is currently used only for objects and animals, but I personally happen to think that if all other areas of the English language can change (and they have in the centuries that English has been around), that one can too.
If the only argument against using ‘it’ as a gender neutral person pronoun is that ‘it’ has always referred to animals and objects in the past, then why is it not equally as valid to insist on ‘he’ as the gender unknown third person pronoun because things have always been done that way in the past?
sigh, No, I didn’t “miss it,” I disagreed with it. You may have absolute control of your writing, but I’d bet dollars to donuts it is rife with spelling, grammar, and continuity errors. It’s possible you may produce crystalline, error-free prose and poetry, but you’d be the first author in the history of literature to do so.
It is apparent that you misunderstand the purpose of editing. Good editors do not change an author’s meaning; that, in fact, is a cardinal editing sin. An editor’s purpose is to fix errors, to prune redundancies, to query style and usage inconsistencies. A good editor intensifies and clarifies the author’s meaning.
That’s not the argument I made. Using ‘it’ to replace “he or she” robs the word of meaning without adding clarification. I never made any appeal to the past.
There have been attempts before to create new, gender-neutral pronouns–thon, shen, e-- and they have all failed. When I can find a good precís of Pinker’s reinterpretation of Chomsky’s “deep grammar” explanation of the inability to reform the language to include gender-neutral pronouns, I’ll post it.
It may be a cardinal sin in editing but it is done. Or haven’t you ever read Podkyne of Mars by Robert A. Heinlein? It’s about a man who takes his niece and nephew on vacation to Mars with him when their parents decide to have a third child now that the mother’s career is established. What he doesn’t tell them is that he’s using the kids as a cover for a political mission he’s on, resulting in his niece’s death. In the original Heinlein ending, he takes full responsibility for causing his niece’s death when he talks to her mother. In the version that was published, courtesy of his editor, the uncle’s conversation with the girl’s mother turns into a vicious anti-feminist diatribe, basically blaming the mother for the girl’s death and telling her how she should have minded her children rather than have a career.
I agree that an editor is supposed to make grammatical changes, etc., but many can’t help putting their own slant on things.
Someone who does not know what my meaning was because they were not inside my head when I hatched the idea cannot possibly ‘clarify’ it better than I can.
As for grammatical and spelling errors, I proofread exhaustively before I’ll print something. I don’t produce perfection in the rough draft, but there’s no reason I can’t edit my own work.
Yes, because if the person in an example in an engineering text book were a woman, the entire sentence would be reduced to fucking gibberish.
This is quite possibly the most worthless situation of all, because it makes no fucking difference whatsoever. You can have a text that conveys information and also implies that engineers are never women, or you can have a text that conveys the exact same information, and does NOT imply that engineers are never women. There is no loss of goddamned semantic value. What possible reason is there to object to this besides, “I am a stupid fuck and feminists ate my balls!!”?
Yue: If it’s the exact same either way, what’s the point of any of this debate? Why would people care one way or the other what little marks on paper say?
We should have better things to think about, methinks.
Because, in this specific example, there are female engineers who feel like they’re being treated like they don’t exist by the text. Since the two texts equally teach engineering, there’s no reason not to treat them with respect, but Philo’s post:
claims that it would somehow make the text useless.
