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From: mfs@mhuxr.UUCP (SIMON)
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: Re: A Small Victory; Not at All
Message-ID: <269@mhuxr.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 15-Mar-85 12:03:52 EST
Article-I.D.: mhuxr.269
Posted: Fri Mar 15 12:03:52 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 16-Mar-85 04:30:34 EST
References: <824@druxo.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill
Lines: 43

> : Nancy Parsons
> Just want to share a small victory (I love to celebrate)...
> 
> Last night, Crossroads in Faith Ministries, an organization working in the
> field of domestic violence, adopted a set of bylaws containing the
> following footnote:
> 
>     Throughout this document, the personal pronouns "they," "them," and
>     "their" are used to indicate third person *SINGULAR* when the referent
>     may be either female or male (a grammatical form practiced for
>     centuries by reputable writers such as Shakespeare, Shaw, and Scott
>     Fitzgerald).
> 
> One reason this is significant is that the organization is one of typically
> "traditional" or "conservative" church people who have come to recognize
> that traditional language transmits values and behavioral models that
> contribute to attitudes leading to domestic violence.
> 

Wait a minute. Are you saying that the use of 'he' and 'she' instead of the
grammatically incorect, ambiguous 'they' promotes domestic violence??????

Actually, I do not understand why people spend so much time on such trivial
tasks as eradicating gender specific pronouns from the language. Aside
from making it more dificult to understand what we say or write to each other,
what specific "victory" is derived by not using 'he' or 'she'? It is always
possible to express oneself in a gender neutral manner; one may have to think
a bit before speaking though. God forbid we should have to think before
speaking or writing! Now that we have had a female candidate for the
Vice Presidency of this country, now that we are seeing the fruits
of these past twenty years of activism, with women in the work force
making their way up their various fields' ladders, is it really advancing
the cause of and of benefit to women to advocate greater vagueness in the
language? Frankly, I find nothing to celebrate here.

I have no problem with a language evolving from the grass roots. New words
are constantly created to fill gaps in meaning. But this trend to a generic,
bland, boring, confusing, WRONG 'they' is not evolution but retrogression.

Sorry for the flame tone, but I am surprised and dismayed when I see normally
clear thinking folks like Parsons embrace such mush.

Marcel Simon