Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!bloom-beacon!daemon
From: bloch%mandrill@ucsd.edu (Steve Bloch)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: The unfortunate `generic masculine'
Keywords: grammar, he, one, women
Message-ID: <12325@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 27 Jun 89 21:16:33 GMT
References: <14647@duke.cs.duke.edu> <18083@paris.ics.uci.edu> <3268@ogccse.ogc.edu> <12234@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Sender: ambar@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: bloch%mandrill.UUCP@ucsd.edu (Steve Bloch)
Organization: University of California, San Diego
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Approved: ambar@bloom-beacon.mit.edu

bevans@tesla.unm.edu (Mathemagician) writes:
>At the present moment, "one" can sound contrived or haughty...
>
>At the present moment, "they" is the "best" alternative I can think of.

The "right" solution of course is to change the present moment, and
make "one" or some such neuter pronoun acceptable.  After all, in
everyday conversation a person's gender is seldom highly relevant to
the discussion.  But there's a lot of inertia against that one, as
you point out.  On the other hand, "they" with a singular verb, or a
singular antecedent, REALLY bugs me (as does "data" used in the
singular, so maybe I'm weird).

Douglas Hofstadter, in _Metamagical_Themas_, discusses the issue and
concludes that in a surprisingly large number of cases the pronoun can
be omitted entirely by restructuring the sentence.  And in many other
cases a gender-specific pronoun is unobjectionable because the
identity and gender of its antecedent are known (William Strunk
complains about "A friend of mine once told me that they...") In the
remaining cases, I either use "one" or alternate "him"s and "her"s
randomly.

Another grammatical question: why is "women" used so much as an adjec-
tive, sometimes even for singular objects?  ("women writers", etc.)
It sounds almost as ludicrous as its male counterpart, especially when
we have perfectly good adjectives "male" and "female".

"The above opinions are my own.  But that's just my opinion."
Stephen Bloch