Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!agate!unisoft!gethen!farren@ucbvax.berkeley.edu From: unisoft!gethen!farren@ucbvax.berkeley.edu (Michael J. Farren) Newsgroups: comp.society.women Subject: Re: Language in a Requirements Specification Message-ID: <13056@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> Date: 9 Aug 88 00:49:10 GMT References: <12781@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <12878@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU Lines: 148 Approved: skyler@violet.berkeley.edu (Moderator -- Trish Roberts) Comments-to: comp-women-request@cs.purdue.edu Submissions-to: comp-women@cs.purdue.edu [Although the initial inquiry has long since been answered, there are still enough responses coming in which raise interesting issues that I thought I'd post some more. TR] ==================================================================== From: unisoft!gethen!farren@ucbvax.berkeley.edu (Michael J. Farren) marie@ernie.Berkeley.EDU (Marie desJardins) writes: >>Will the appearance of >>male pronouns as generic pronouns cause any undue discomfort for a reader? > >I suggest adopting any of the following strategies: [...] > 4. Use an invented pronoun, with a note at the > beginning that you are following this usage > (e.g. "mun" instead of "he", "him", "she" or "her"; > "muns" instead of "his" or "hers") Do NOT use this strategy if your desire is to create documentation which will be easily readable, without "undue discomfort to the reader". No matter how many disclaimers you put in the beginning, readers will still stumble over each and every occurence of the invented pronoun. While acceptable for casual writing, in more formal writing this is badly out of place. When and if someone comes up with a euphonious gender-neutral pronoun, and it becomes commonly used in casual communication, it may well become common enough to gain a foothold in the language, and thus become appropriate for more formal usage. Until then, though, all you will be doing is creating obstacles to communication, not facilitating it. "Ms." is a good example - at first used only within the feminist community, it slowly spread, because of its obvious similarity to "Mr." and "Mrs.", and its obvious use as a marital-status-neutral salutation. It took years before its use was accepted in more formal circumstances, such as newspapers. Personally, I would like to see a good gender-neutral pronoun, but none of those proposed so far sound right. "hir", "pern", and the like are all much too dissimilar to standard English - they just clash in my asthetic sense. Until someone creates a word which "fits", I would recommend judicious use of the alternating "he" and "she" technique, along with more use of "their", in circumstances where its use is appropriate. -- Michael J. Farren | "INVESTIGATE your point of view, don't just {ucbvax, uunet, hoptoad}! | dogmatize it! Reflect on it and re-evaluate unisoft!gethen!farren | it. You may want to change your mind someday." gethen!farren@lll-winken.llnl.gov ----- Tom Reingold, from alt.flame ======================================================================= From: R Fairbairns I'ld cast a vote for she/hers on the basis of affirmative action, balancing the last 1500 years, etc... However, analysis of the issue may perhaps prove illuminating. I think it's misleading to consider humanity as a whole when guessing reaction. For the present purpose, I think there are three classes of human: 1. The male supremacist (Who may be of either gender, of course.) They will either think "fancy, I didn't know that was a woman's job", or "it's those raving feminists at it again!". So what? They deserve to be stirred up. 2. The non-sexist woman. Probably won't notice at all... (I'm not really qualified to be sure, however.) 3. The non-sexist man Will be pulled up short, but will immediately realize what's going on (Mary- Claire van Leunen notwithstanding). I experienced this recently with an early draft of an OSI standard(!): no real problem. My objections to some of the alternatives offered: A. Invented words. We have too many invented words in computing as it is. If the language needs a genderless generic, it'll arise in due course. I don't believe (as a general rule) in trying that route for encouraging social change. (Incidentally, the word "mun", which somebody suggested, is an existing English dialect word at least twice over - once meaning "must" and once meaning "he/him"!) B. Plural pronouns for singular meaning I just find this confusing and ugly. So what if lots of good writers do this extraordinary thing? No doubt, if I were a Fielding or an Austen I could get away with it, but I'm not. Anyway, Austen spells `surprise' "surprize": who's going to justify the invasion of the `z's on that basis? Robin Fairbairns ^ | male of that ilk ========================================================================= Sarah Groves Hobart writes: In article <12781@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> bunker!rha@purdue.edu (Robert H. Averack) writes: >[...] during >the course of making references to Users, I have been using the pronouns >"him" and "his" as generics. > The solution I use is to make all references to generic people plural. In that way I can use the generic pronouns "they" and "their". Example: When the user types this command, he . . . When users type this command, they . . . I also support the use of "they" and "their" with singular precedents, but since there is some controversy about this method, I tend to avoid it in published papers. Not everyone can agree, can they? Sarah Groves Hobart -- {ihnp4,amdahl,sun}!pacbell!laticorp!sarah ========================================================================== From: well!slf@lll-crg.llnl.gov (Sharon Lynne Fisher) Regarding his and her: I'm an editor, and I run into this a lot. In many, many of the cases, it's possible to get rid of the hisness by rewriting the sentence a little. And no, you don' t always end up with the passive voice. Instead of "the user inserts his disk into his PC," what's wrong with "inserting *the* disk into *the* PC"? ===================================================================== Eugene Miya writes: Teresa Roberts devoted a page to this issue in her PhD thesis on text editors. (She justified the use of she in her thesis). I thought about posting, this, but a better idea came to me. Some years ago, I was researching Lorinda Cherry's Writer's Work Bench (WWB, not to be confused with the Documenter's Work Bench). Anyway I discovered the program sexist(1). We don't have WWB on any of our systems here at Ames, but fortunately I have access to it elsewhere. Are "man" pages copywritten? Sexist(1) had a reference document. [Well I suspended this letter and did wwbinfo and wwbaid, no man page]. I don't have the hardcopy WWB document in my office anymore. This is only a suggestion, the shell scripts sound a bit more strict about copyright. Hope this helps [may sell a few WWB systems...]. --eugene miya