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Just read this headline on slate's XXfactor blog: "No More Sexting With Sotomayor on the Court"
Seems like a positive change... it's just inappropriate to distract a justice while she's working like that!
Glenn said:
On our last trip to Washington D.C., my wife and I had the opportunity to visit the Newseum. Upon first entering, we stopped in the restrooms and both came out laughing. They had many of the wall tiles reproducing various crash blossoms. One sure item on our gift-shop list was their book of these collected crash blossoms, Correct Me If I'm Wrong. Since this is a news museum, all of the quotes come complete with reference citations.
Some of the charmers are:
Crack in toilet bowl leads to 3 arrests.
Nuns forgive break-in, assault suspect
Water parasite fears move to Alberta
Police oversight group like San Jose modelIf you like crash blossoms, go to the Newseum.org online shop and buy the book.
Regarding reduplications in French. I haven't looked at the links, but they're all over the place in current French, in particular in children's language.
For example, the words (same or similar in English) for family:
maman, papa, with a variant mamie or papy, used for grandmother and grandfather. Similarly tata (aunt from tante) and tonton (uncle, from oncle), with tatie being an aunt, or more commonly, a great aunt.
They're also common in nicknames:
Christophe gives CriCri and Totophe, Isabelle gives Zaza and Zazie, Honoré give Nono, André gives Dédé, Claude gives Cloclo (as in Claude François), Henri gives Riri, etc. Other names give their own particular models of nickname (Jean gives Jeannot, for example), and there seem to be some names with no nicknames (I can't think of one for François, for example).
Word Nerd said:
I think they/them is becoming an acceptable gender-neutral pronoun.
I have been using the singular "they" for about seventeen years. I do not know how I learned it since I was not aware of other people using it at the time. It just occurred to me spontaneously and struck me as perfectly natural so I did not feel awkward using it and people that I spoke with did make a fuss either. I was shocked when I eventually read "What Color is Your Parachute?" by Richard Bolles because, in the introduction, he declares that he has uses the singular "they" in the book and that this use has precedent in some earlier form of English. (He doesn't specify which form but I am guessing pre-Norman Invasion Old English.) I wonder if English has some kind of subliminal memory that allowed me to use the word without knowing that it existed.
Glenn Peters said:
He/him is officially correct for the indeterminate gender.
"He" used to be the official rule. However, I have not seen it used in any contemporary books or articles in a long time so it is clearly not the official rule any more. The current practice seems to be to either awkwardly circumlocute around the issue or to switch back and forth between "he" and "she". (Both annoy me almost as much as using "he" only.) Even when "he" was the official rule, it did not reflect the reality of the language. An English teacher I had in high school illustrated this by using it in a sentence that clearly applied to females. For example, "My gynecologist is the best. If anyone here ever has really bad menstrual cramps HE should definitely see Dr. X." or "I could not tell whether the attacker was male or female. All I could tell was that HE wore a red jacket." I don't know how many hundreds of years you would have to go back before these uses of "he" would make sense or if they ever did.
Grant
1. do you know CRASH BLOSSOMS made New York Times lsit of top words of
2009 via BEn SChott blog?
2. do you know that I coined the term ''CRASH BLOSSOMS'', ask
me when and how and why i did it and maybe blog on it later...the
truth....''Nessie3'' gave example of one of those crazy headlines on
testycopyeditors org and i read it and i sugested to him Nessie3 that
from now on we call those hedlines "crash blossoms" afer the words in
his found headline and everybody agreed it was a good idea so i
started first blog on it called http://amafubme.blogspot.com
AMFUBME means? gueess?
ahppy 2010
If anyone here ever has really bad menstrual cramps HE should definitely see Dr. X."
Unless things have really changed while I wasn't looking, there's nothing of indeterminate gender in this example except Dr. X. "She" was perfectly correct in the old days in this circumstance, and no reason to make it "they" today. Unless, of course, "anyone" is plural.
I understand the need for a neutral singular pronoun, but I find it very, very difficult to use the plural as a substitute. When the need arises, and when I remember (and I have a very vocal 28-year-old daughter to remind me) I do use the clumsy "he or she" or the abysmally awkward circumlocution, but never the alternation of gender. Seems to me that that method requires making it come out even every time. It may be that those plurals are making the shift to singular as well–it seems to work all right with "you"–but I suspect that I will always struggle with it.
Peter
tromboniator said:
If anyone here ever has really bad menstrual cramps HE should definitely see Dr. X."
Unless things have really changed while I wasn't looking, there's nothing of indeterminate gender in this example except Dr. X. "She" was perfectly correct in the old days in this circumstance, and no reason to make it "they" today. Unless, of course, "anyone" is plural.
The point is that if "he" was gender neutral, as some claim, then it would work in a context where a female was clearly indicated. Also, in my example, "anyone here" does have indeterminate gender. The speaker might not even know the sexes of the people being spoken to.
While I don't think that gender neutral is the term I would use for the use of he in generic contexts, I would say that you can't assume a gender-neutral term can always correctly be substituted for a gender-specific term in all contexts. I also think you must distinguish between gender neutrality (can be used in all contexts; e.g. they can be used for men, women, mixed groups, books, animals, hairpins), gender ambiguity (can be used when gender is indeterminate; e.g. who, somebody), and gender duality (i.e. can be used equally well for either gender; e.g. parent, child)
It is interesting that languages with strong grammatical gender struggle with combining grammatical gender with biological gender. This can often come up when considering professions.
For some professions, the word is identical (I think of these words as dual m/f) in masculine and feminine, but the article, when used, would distinguish biological genders. In other languages, the gender of adjectives applied to a grammatically masculine profession word are masculine, but then the verb form and predicate adjective would be dictated by the biological gender, and be in a feminine form if the professional were known to be a woman. Yesterday, my(m) family(m) doctor(m) was(f) ill(f).
Many languages are in transition on these topics, and have a much more tangled set of questions to resolve than English has.
In Russian, for example, the grammatical gender makes the biological gender of an animal irrelevant: the pregnant whale swam slowly (N.B. whale in Russian is grammatically masculine) would be rendered properly by pregnant(m!) whale(m) swam(m) … . In Russian, there has arisen some significant variation in applying grammatical gender only when it comes to the biological gender of people. The sentence above,
Yesterday, my family doctor was ill.
could be rendered in Russian for a woman doctor as:
my(m) family(m) doctor(m) was(f) ill(f) — especially in more formal contexts
or
my(f) family(m) doctor(m) was(f) ill(f) — especially in less formal contexts
The point is that if "he" was gender neutral, as some claim, then it would work in a context where a female was clearly indicated. Also, in my example, "anyone here" does have indeterminate gender. The speaker might not even know the sexes of the people being spoken to.
I stand corrected on "anyone here"; however, as to the pronoun, we were discussing indeterminacy, not neutrality. Menstrual cramps are not gender indeterminate, and need not, I think, be referred to neutrally. Perhaps I'm misconstruing something, but I don't believe there's an issue about substituting neutrality where gender is clearly indicated. Is anyone advocating that? I understand the use of "he" in the indeterminate, and I understand, even applaud, the opposition to it. I certainly do not understand the claim that "he" can be gender neutral. We could use "it" as a gender neutral pronoun, but for some reason no one seems to want to apply it to a person. Too neutral?
Glenn, thanks for your elaborations. It is fascinating to try to look at language issues filtered through different rules.
Peter
During the repeat, I noticed again the mention of the MAD Magazine cartoon of the puzzled hotcakes vendor. If memory serves, he was more than just puzzled, he was annoyed by someone who had innocently asked him how they were selling. (Or maybe there was a cartoon on the same topic in some other magazine.)
Anyway, I may have been influenced by that cartoon when I came up with this one:
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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