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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!akgua!sdcrdcf!hplabs!hao!cires!nbires!opus!rcd
From: rcd@opus.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.flame
Subject: Re: Amen, sister, Amen!
Message-ID: <283@opus.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 3-Apr-84 02:54:09 EST
Article-I.D.: opus.283
Posted: Tue Apr  3 02:54:09 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 31-Mar-84 10:11:48 EST
References: <276@vortex.UUCP> <739@eosp1.UUCP>
Organization: NBI, Boulder
Lines: 42

<>
> Ah, yes, but in these days of freedom from sexism, nouns and pronouns
> that formerly connoted gender no longer do, right?  We can use the
> generic "she" interchangeably with "he", why not "brother" and
> "sister"?  Therefore, the gender assumptions in this case can just as
> correctly be said to be on the other side of the network wire. (:-)
> (Sorry if I offended).

Actually, what we have these days is a basic ignorance of the difference
between gender and sex - engendered (sic) no doubt, by some
well-intentioned but misguided folk who were trying to "de-sex" (!)
language and ended up "de-gendering" it.
If your dictionary hasn't been "modernized" yet, you can probably find that
gender is (was) a property of nouns which related to agreement with
adjectives.  In languages which have gender for all nouns, the concept is
obvious - but for the many out there who regard a knowledge of English
alone as sufficient (reference to now-extinguished flame topic), gender
occurs so infrequently that it gets confused with sex.  (That is, if you
spoke a language in which "table" is feminine and "book" is masculine, you
could keep them straight, I hope!)

Removing gender from language really isn't such a bad idea - if it could be
done for the right reasons (i.e., because it's not a terribly useful
concept, rather than because it's allegedly sexist).  Unfortunately, I
think it's a step in the trend toward a real Newspeak.  The death of the
subjunctive, which would seem to have happened years ago, is another.  The
removal of gender is being done in such a clumsy, stupid way that we're
going to lose something else in the process:  agreement in number.  How
often have you seen something like:
	A user may decide that they want to . . .
...which is wrong, wrong, wrong!  It violates grammatical rules you should
have learned in the third grade - "user" is singular, "they" is plural.

Fume, sputter, sputter...

And easily a third of the netters - who ought to be somewhat above average
in verbal skills - can't even get the difference between "its" and "it's".

Foam, rage, scowl...I'll be OK in a minute.

-- 
{hao,ucbvax,allegra}!nbires!rcd