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From: mccolm@ucla-cs.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: Re: Now is the time for all good men...
Message-ID: <5792@ucla-cs.ARPA>
Date: Sun, 2-Jun-85 21:17:18 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucla-cs.5792
Posted: Sun Jun  2 21:17:18 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 6-Jun-85 11:07:52 EDT
References: <742@oddjob.UUCP> <717@mtuxo.UUCP> <348@osiris.UUCP> <579@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP>
Reply-To: mccolm@ucla-cs.UUCP (Eric McColm)
Organization: UCLA Computer Science Department
Lines: 32

(A book with gender-neutral language constructs...)
>
>In _The_Cook_and_the_Carpenter (copyright 1973) June Arnold (the carpenter)
>used 'na'.  'Nan' was the possesive, and 'naself' was used as well....
>
>I must confess that, even tho I'm a raging feminist, and even tho I assumed
>from the above statement that the author was as well, I nevertheless was
>occasionally somewhat confused as to which was which....
>
>--JB                                          Life is just a bowl.

The author has purposefully removed the gender-specific language constructs,
and if she (inferred from name) had done as well as she intended, you would
finish the book not knowing the sex of some of the characters.  So you
should be confused as to their respective sexes.  But you can only be
confused if you are trying to figure it out.

The message that I read from this is that the gender-neutral constructs
will not convey the information about sex because that information is not
seen as important.  This would be the big change in society resulting from
a gender-neutral pronoun:  the sex of the person under of discussion would
be included only if it was important to the discussion (meaning rarely.)

Of course, sex remains a part of self-image, but wouldn't it be refreshing
to be thought of as human first and as one sex or the other sometime later?
--fini--

Eric McColm
UCLA (oo' - kluh) Funny Farm for the Criminally Harmless
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"Brevity is Wit; Politics is Obscenity; Relativity is Maddening."