negative payload "he"

[Jonathan Lighter]

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.

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
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