<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Re: Gender neutrality and language</TITLE>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<META content="MSHTML 6.00.2900.2873" name=GENERATOR>
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=#ffffff>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I'm not sure if this Weekly Standard article has
made the rounds. Apparently we are all to blame.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>/Jake</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV>
<TABLE bgColor=white>
<TBODY>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top width="100%" bgColor=white><SPAN class=head>Feminism and
the English Language</SPAN> <BR><SPAN class=deck>Can the damage to our
mother tongue be undone?</SPAN> <BR>by David Gelernter <BR>03/03/2008,
Volume 013, Issue 24 <BR>
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%" border=0>
<TBODY>
<TR>
<TD vAlign=top align=left>
<P><!-- If you see this comment there should be an image displayed with this section --><!-- Obj position=R--><BR></P>
<P>How can I teach my students to write decently when the English
language has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the
Academic-Industrial Complex? Our language used to belong to all its
speakers and readers and writers. But in the 1970s and '80s,
arrogant ideologues began recasting English into heavy artillery to
defend the borders of the New Feminist state. In consequence we have
all got used to sentences where puffed-up words like "chairperson"
and "humankind" strut and preen, where <I>he-or-she</I>'s keep
bashing into surrounding phrases like bumper cars and related
deformities blossom like blisters; they are all markers of an
epoch-making victory of propaganda over common sense.</P>
<P>We have allowed ideologues to pocket a priceless property and
walk away with it. Today, as college students and full-fledged young
English teachers emerge from the feminist incubator in which they
have spent their whole lives, this victory of brainless ideology is
on the brink of becoming institutionalized. If we mean to put things
right, we can't wait much longer.</P>
<P>Our ability to write and read good, clear English connects us to
one another and to our common past. The prime rule of writing is to
keep it simple, concrete, concise. Shakespeare's most perfect
phrases are miraculously simple and terse. ("Thou art the thing
itself." "A plague o' both your houses." "Can one desire too much of
a good thing?") The young Jane Austen is praised by her descendants
for having written "pure simple English." Meanwhile, in everyday
prose, a word with useless syllables or a sentence with useless
words is a house fancied-up with fake dormers and chimneys. It is
ugly and boring and cheap, and impossible to take seriously. </P>
<P>But our problem goes deeper than a few silly words and many
tedious sentences. How can I (how can any teacher) get students to
take the prime rule seriously when virtually the whole educational
establishment teaches the opposite? When students have been ordered
since first grade to put "he or she" in spots where "he" would mean
exactly the same thing, and "firefighter" where "fireman" would mean
exactly the same thing? How can we then tell them, "Make every word,
every syllable count!" They may be ignorant but they're not stupid.
The well-aimed torpedo of Feminist English has sunk the whole
process of teaching students to write. The small minority of born
writers will always get by, inventing their own rules as they go.
But we used to expect every educated citizen to write decently--and
that goal is out the window.</P>
<P>"He or she" is the proud marshal of this pathetic parade. It has
generated a cascading series of problems in which the Establishment,
having noticed that Officially Approved gender-neutral sentences
sound rotten, has dreamt up alternatives that are even worse. So
let's consider "he or she." In some cases the awfulness of a
feminist phrase requires several paragraphs to investigate
systematically. Such investigations are worth pursuing nonetheless;
our language is at stake.</P>
<P>When the style-smashers first announced, decades ago, that the
neutral "he" meant "male" and excluded "female," they were lying and
knew it. After all, when a critic like Mary Lascelles writes (in her
classic 1939 study of Jane Austen) that "no reader can vouch for
more than his own experience," one can hardly accuse her of
envisioning male readers only. In feminist minds ideology excused
the lie, and the goal of interchangeable sexes was a far greater
good than decent English. Even today's English professors have heard
(I suppose) of Eudora Welty, who wrote in her 1984 memoirs--just as
the feminist anti-English campaign was nearing total victory--that
every story writer imagines himself inside his characters; "it is
his first step, and his last too." Was the author demonstrating her
inability to write proper English? Or merely letting us know that
there is no such thing as a female writer? </P>
<P>E.B. White was our greatest modern source of the purest,
freshest, clearest, most bracing English, straight from a magic
spring that bubbled for him alone. With A.J. Liebling and Joseph
Mitchell, he was one of a triumvirate that made the <I>New
Yorker</I> under its great editor Harold Ross a thing of beauty and
a joy forever. The <I>Elements of Style</I>, White's revision of a
short textbook by his Cornell professor William Strunk, is justly
revered as the best thing of its kind. In the third edition (1979),
White lays down the law on the he-or-she epidemic that was sweeping
the country like a bad flu (or a bad joke).</P>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>The use of <I>he</I> as a pronoun for nouns embracing both
genders is a simple, practical convention rooted in the beginnings
of the English language. <I>He</I> has lost all suggestion of
maleness in these circumstances. The word was unquestionably
biased to begin with (the dominant male), but after hundreds of
years it has become seemingly indispensable. It has no pejorative
connotations; it is never incorrect. </P></BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>(Warning: White died in 1985; a later edition of <I>Elements</I>
published after his death is a disgrace to his memory.) In his 1984
White biography, Scott Elledge tells a remarkable story about "he or
she":</P>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<P><I>The New Yorker</I> rejected [in 1971] a parable White had
written about the campaign of feminists to abolish the use of the
pronoun <I>his</I> to mean "his or her." He told Roger Angell [his
wife's son by a previous marriage] that he was "surprised, but not
downhearted, that the piece got sunk. . . . To me, any woman's
(or man's) attempt to remove the gender from the language is both
funny and futile." </P></BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>For the <I>New Yorker</I> to have rejected a piece by White, its
darling and its hero, the man who did more than anyone but Ross
himself to make the magazine the runaway, roaring success it became,
and (by the way) a thorough-going liberal, was a sure sign that
feminism had already got America in a chokehold.</P>
<P>The fixed idea forced by language rapists upon a whole generation
of students, that "he" can refer only to a male, is (in short)
wrong. It is applied with nonsensical inconsistency, too. The same
feminist warriors who would never write "he" where "he or she" will
do would <I>also</I> never write "the author or authoress" where
"the author" will do. They hate such words as actress and waitress;
in these cases they insist that the masculine<I> </I>form<I> </I>be
used for men <I>and</I> women. You would never find my feminist
colleagues writing a phrase such as, "When an Anglican priest or
priestess mounts the pulpit . . . " You <I>will</I> find them
writing, "When an Anglican priest mounts the pulpit, he or she is
about to address the congregation." Logic has never been a strong
suit among the commissar-intellectuals who have bossed American
culture since the 1970s. True, "he" sounds explicitly masculine in a
way "priest" doesn't, to those who are just learning the language.
Children also find it odd that "enough" should be spelled that way,
that New York should be at the same latitude as Spain, that 7
squared is 49, and so on. Education was invented to set people
straight on all these fine points.</P>
<P>He-or-she'ing added so much ugly dead weight to the language that
even the Establishment couldn't help noticing. So feminist
authorities went back to the drawing board. Unsatisfied with having
rammed their 80-ton 16-wheeler into the nimble sports-car of English
style, they proceeded to shoot the legs out from under
grammar--which collapsed in a heap after agreement between subject
and pronoun was declared to be optional. "When an Anglican priest
mounts the pulpit, they are about to address the congregation." How
many of today's high school English teachers would mark this
sentence wrong, or even "awkward"? (Show of hands? Not one?) Yet
such sentences skreak like fingernails on a blackboard.</P>
<P>Slashes are just as bad. He/she is about to address the
congregation" is unacceptable because it's not clear how to
pronounce it: "he she," "he or she," "he slash she"? The unclarity
is a nuisance, and each possibility sounds awful. Writing English is
like writing music: One lays down the footprints of sounds that are
recreated in each reader's mind. To be deaf to English is like being
deaf to birdsong or laughter or rustling trees or babbling
brooks--only worse, because English is the communal, emotional, and
intellectual net that holds this nation together, if anything can.
Occasionally one sees "s/he," which shows not indifference but
outright contempt for the language and the reader.</P>
<P>And it gets worse. At the bottom of this junkpile is a maneuver
that seems to be growing in popularity, at least among college
students: writing "she" instead of neutral "he," or interchanging
"he" and "she" at random. This grotesque outcome follows naturally
from the primordial lie. If you make students believe that "he" can
refer only to a male, then writers who use "he" in sentences
referring to men and women are <I>actually</I> discussing males only
and excluding females--and might just as well use "she" and exclude
males, leaving the reader to sort things out for himself. The
she-sentences that result tend to slam on a reader's brakes and send
him smash-and-spinning into the roadside underbrush, cursing under
his breath. (I still remember the first time I encountered such a
sentence, in an early-1980s book by a noted historian about a Jesuit
in Asia.)</P>
<P>Here is the problem with the dreaded she-sentence. Ideologues can
lie themselves blue in the face without changing the fact that, to
those who know modern English as it existed until the cultural
revolution and still does exist in many quarters, the neutral he
"has lost all suggestion of maleness." But there is no such thing as
a neutral "she"; even feminists don't claim there is. </P>
<P>"The driver turns on his headlights" is not about a male or
female person; it is about a <I>driving </I>person. But "the driver
turns on her headlights" is a sentence about a <I>female</I> driver.
Just as any competent reader listens to what he is reading, he
pictures it too (if it <I>can</I> be pictured); hearing and
imagining the written word are ingrained habits. A reader who had
thought the topic was drivers is now faced by a specifically
<I>female</I> driver, and naturally wonders why. What is the writer
getting at? To distract your reader for political purposes, to trip
him up merely to demonstrate your praiseworthy right-thinkingness,
is a low trick.</P>
<P>White's comment: "If you think <I>she</I> is a handy substitute
for <I>he</I>, try it and see what happens." </P>
<P>Sometimes a writer can avoid plastering his prose with feminist
bumper-stickers and still not provoke the running dogs of the
Establishment by diving into the plural whenever danger threatens.
("Drivers turn on their headlights.") White's comment:</P>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>Alternatively, put all controversial nouns in the plural and
avoid the choice of sex altogether, and you may find your prose
sounding general and diffuse as a result. </P></BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>But the real problem goes deeper. Why should I worry about
feminist ideology while I write? Why should I worry about anyone's
ideology? Writing is a tricky business that requires one's whole
concentration, as any professional will tell you; as no doubt you
know anyway. Who can afford to allow a virtual feminist to elbow her
way like a noisy drunk into that inner mental circle where all your
faculties (such as they are) are laboring to produce decent prose?
Bargaining over the next word, shaping each phrase, netting and
vetting the countless images that drift through the mind like
butterflies in a summer garden, mounting some and releasing
others--and keeping the trajectory and target always in mind? </P>
<P>Throw the bum out.</P>
<P>It's a disgrace that we graduate class after class of young
Americans who will never be able to write down their thoughts
effectively--in a business report, a letter of application or
recommendation, a postcard or email, or any other form. Our one
consolation is that the country is filling up gradually with people
who have been reared on ugly, childish writing and will never expect
anything else. But the implications of our spineless surrender go
deeper. We have accepted, implicitly, a hit-and-run vandalizing of
English--the richest, most expressive language in the world.
Languages such as French are shaped and guided by official boards of
big shots. But English used to be a language of the people, by the
people, for the people. "The living language is like a cowpath,"
wrote White; "it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having
created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or
their needs." We have allowed our academic overlords to plow up
White's cow-path and replace it with a steel-and-concrete highway,
hemmed in by guardrails and heavily patrolled by police. </P>
<P>Of course all languages change. A feminist might say that
he-or-she is merely the latest twist in our ever-changing cowpath;
that he-or-she was the will of the people. But this too is a lie,
and in fairness to my opponents I have never heard them deploy it.
They know that Americans of the late 1960s were not struck en masse
by sudden unhappiness over the neutral he or the word "chairman."
Such complaints never did rank high on the average American's list
of worries. (Way back in the 1970s, "chairperson" was in fact a
one-word joke: an object lesson in the ludicrous places you would
reach if you took Feminist English seriously.) In fact the New
English was deliberately created and pounded into children's heads
by an intellectual elite asserting its control over American
culture. The same conclusion follows independently from a language's
well-established tendency to simplify and compress its existing
structure (like a settling sea-bed) to make room for constantly
arriving new coinages. Words like "authoress" would almost certainly
have disappeared with no help from feminists. But "he" transforming
itself into "he or she" is like a ball rolling uphill. It doesn't
happen unless someone has volunteered to push.</P>
<P>The depressing trail continues one last mile. What happens to a
nation's thinking when you ban such phrases as "great men"? The
alternatives are so bad--"great person" sounds silly; "great human
being" is a casual tribute to a friend--that it's hard to know where
to turn. "Hero" doesn't work; "Wittgenstein was a great man" is a
self-sufficient assertion, but "Wittgenstein was a hero" is not. Was
he a war hero, a philosophical hero? (Yes and yes.) "Wittgenstein
was a great heart" (also true) can't be rephrased in hero-speak, and
can't substitute for "great man" either. </P>
<P>We happen to know also that the <I>idea</I> of "great men" has
been bounced right out of education at every level. Nowadays
students are taught to admire celebrities and money instead. We
might well have misplaced the "great man" idea anyway, but losing
the phrase didn't help. Civilization copes poorly with ideas that
have no names.</P>
<P>And what should we say instead of "brotherhood"? "Crown thy good
with siblinghood"? "Tolerance" is no substitute for "brotherhood";
it's passive and bland where "brotherhood" is active and inspiring.
"Brotherhood" has accordingly been quietly stricken from the list of
good things to which Americans should aspire. </P>
<P>We allowed ideologues to wreck the English language. Do we have
the courage to rebuild?</P>
<P><I>David Gelernter, a national fellow of the American Enterprise
Institute and a contributing editor to</I> THE WEEKLY STANDARD<I>,
is a professor of computer science at Yale.</I></P>
<P></P></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%" border=0>
<TBODY>
<TR>
<TD align=middle width="100%" bgColor=white>© Copyright 2008, News
Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights
Reserved.</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message ----- </DIV>
<DIV
style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; FONT: 10pt arial; font-color: black"><B>From:</B>
<A title=rkephart@unf.edu href="mailto:rkephart@unf.edu">Ronald Kephart</A>
</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>To:</B> <A
title=lgpolicy-list@ccat.sas.upenn.edu
href="mailto:lgpolicy-list@ccat.sas.upenn.edu">lgpolicy-list@ccat.sas.upenn.edu</A>
</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Sent:</B> Tuesday, March 04, 2008 9:17
AM</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Subject:</B> Re: Gender neutrality and
language</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV><FONT face="Times New Roman"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 14px">On
3/3/08 9:12 PM, "Ann Evans" <<A
href="mailto:annevans123@gmail.com">annevans123@gmail.com</A>>
wrote:<BR><BR>> <FONT color=#0000ff>It's interesting that this post has
degenerated into a religious discussion <BR>> ....<BR></FONT>> <BR>And I
apologize for that, since it was my fault. I am especially sensitive <BR>to
this issue this semester because I am teaching a cultural anthropology
<BR>course that seems to have an unusually high number of creationists,
<BR>intelligent designists, and theistic evolutionists. So when a poster here
<BR>seemed to suggest that the male first, female second order of things was
put <BR>there by a god, my anti-nonsense reflex went into overdrive.
Sorry.<BR><BR>At the same, though, I agree with Lynn that this wasn’t
necessarily a <BR>“degeneration.” Folk models of language play an important,
sometimes <BR>Determinative, role in language policies, and beliefs and values
regarding <BR>the supernatural are often a part of those folk
models.<BR><BR>> <FONT color=#0000ff>...when something extremely pertinent
is at hand. How are we to express the <BR>> gender-neutral pronoun?
I tell my classes that it will be up to them to <BR>> figure this one
out, but I would like to be a of a little more help to them <BR>> than
that. Is it true that "they" was once legitimately the gender-neutral
<BR>> third-person singular pronoun? How else, other than rewriting
sentences, can <BR>> this issue be resolved. One posting recently
mentioned "yo" as a <BR>> gender-neutral pronoun, but I don't see that
catching on. Any other <BR>> inventions lately?<BR>>
<BR></FONT>Yes, “they” has been, historically, used as a generic pronoun, and
by some <BR>pretty good writers, too. For example:<BR><BR>There's not a man I
meet but doth salute me / As if I were <FONT color=#ff0000>their
<BR></FONT>well-acquainted friend <BR>— Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, Act
IV, Scene 3 <BR>(1594)<BR><BR>"To be sure, you knew no actual good of me --
but nobody thinks of that when <BR>they fall in love."<BR>__Jane Austen, Pride
and Prejudice (1813)<BR><BR>A person cannot help <FONT color=#ff0000>their
</FONT>birth.<BR>— Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848)<BR><BR>And so on. So, I don’t
think we need to invent anything, and in any case <BR>inventing a pronoun
(closed lexical class) is a lot harder than inventing <BR>nouns and verbs,
which are open classes. (Note though that we already <BR>invented “y’all” and
“youze,” and “you-uns” to express second person plural, <BR>which “standard”
English lacks, and some African American communities <BR>borrowed the Igbo
second plural; “unu” to fill this gap.)<BR><BR>The simplest and most elegant
way to fix this, in my view, is to make <BR>generic sentences plural, so that
“they” doesn’t upset the Grammar
Police.<BR><BR>Ron<BR><BR></BLOCKQUOTE></SPAN></FONT></BODY></HTML>