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From: john@cisden.UUCP (John Woolley)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: He and She
Message-ID: <555@cisden.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 13-Mar-86 11:44:31 EST
Article-I.D.: cisden.555
Posted: Thu Mar 13 11:44:31 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 16-Mar-86 10:49:15 EST
Reply-To: john@cisden.UUCP (John Woolley)
Organization: ConTel Information Systems, Denver
Lines: 50
Summary: The Answer at last

This is sort of in response to Ken Arnold's recent posting on the he/she
question of English pronouns.  I tried to do a 'F'ollowup and got a strange
core dump.  I'm sure you'll all be happy finally to have The Answer.

Some nouns are clearly feminine in gender, like "princess", "ship", "bitch".
(Go ahead, flame me.)  Some are equally masculine, like "waiter", "gigolo",
or "priest".  (Make my day.)  Then there are lots of nouns that have a
strong gender-component in their semantic makeup, but which can be applied
to individuals of either sex, like Ken's examples of "nurse" and "secretary",
or "senator", "labourer", "homemaker", "soldier".  (Some of these I call
"tends-to-feminine", some "tends-to-masculine".)  And finally, there are
plenty of nouns that refer to persons without any gender-component I can
detect -- "driver", "authour", "linguist", "child".

The rule in English seems to be that the speaker uses feminine pronouns to
refer to individuals of unspecified or unknown sex if the antecedent noun
is either in the feminine or in the tends-to-feminine class.  He uses 
masculine pronouns if the antecedent is masculine, or tends-to-masculine,
or gender-neutral.

There are two issues here, which we ought to separate:  which particular
nouns ought to be or are perceived as being in which categories?  and, Is
it somehow inappropriate to use masculine pronouns for actually gender-
neutral nouns?

In answer to the first question, I say it's a matter of the writer's choice,
and we can all agree to live with each other's choices.  I think Ken is
right that the perceived femininity (feminicity?) of the nouns "nurse" and
"secretary" affects the choice of pronoun; so someone who really wanted to
emphasize his refusal to stereotype those professions might well use "he",
moving them from the tends-to-feminine class into the gender-neutral class.
This strikes me as entirely tolerable, even very useful at times.

In answer to the second (Should "he" be used with reference to, say,
"performer"), I see no compelling reason to call out the thought police to
enforce a change in the language.  We don't have a special pronoun for
this use, the fact that we don't is no more insulting to one sex than to
the other, and there's no alternative available that strikes right-thinking
people (me, that is) as anything short of barbarous, awkward, ugly, like
totally gross.

Locutus sum -- causa finita.  (Praei, nefari, diem fac mihi.)

As a side question, which maybe someone can answer, what do radicals do in
languages like French, where almost every noun and adjective has specific
gender, or Hebrew, where even the verbs do?  We think we got problems ...
-- 
				Peace and Good!,
				      Fr. John Woolley
"Compared to what I have seen, all that I have written is straw." -- St. Thomas