negative payload "he"

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:56 AM -0700 9/21/05, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>I thought of that too, but it just pushes thetaboo a step backwards.
>Everyone knows Blanco is a "she" and that Bush is a "he."  If Shaw's
>idea was to avert any paranoic inference that he was praising Bush
>simply because Bush is a man and Blanco isn't, that would still
>imply observance of a (slightly more limited) taboo against
>identifying men as "he" in such circumstances.

No, that's not my claim (or, I think, Jim's).  What we're saying is
that Shaw intended to highlight Blanco as the implied target of
comparison, in a way that using "he" would not have done.  The "they"
effectively foregrounds this "as opposed to you-know-who" implication.

larry

>
>Just to clarify for lurking whippersnappers, when I was in grade
>school in the mid fifties, pronominal "they" was widely used to help
>conceal a person's identity if the identity would be made obvious
>from the choice of "he" or "she"; and also to refer to unknown
>persons whose sex was not known.
>
>JL
>
>Jim Parish <jparish at SIUE.EDU> wrote:
>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender: American Dialect Society
>Poster: Jim Parish
>Subject: Re: negative payload "he"
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Jonathan Lighter asked:
>>  Republican Congressman Clay Shaw of Florida knows that Jeb Bush is Governor.
>>  So what could have led him to say on Fox News about five minutes ago, in
>>  regard to Hurrican Rita,
>>
>>  "In Florida we had a governor who knew what they were doing" ?
>
>My guess is that there's an implicit contrast with Louisiana Governor Kathleen
>Blanco:
>"In Louisiana they had a governor who didn't know what *(he was)/they were
>doing."
>
>Jim Parish
>-------------------------------------------------
>SIUE Web Mail
>
>__________________________________________________
>Do You Yahoo!?
>Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
>http://mail.yahoo.com