Query: Why "she" in reference to a ship?

[Jonathan Lighter]

FWIW, the use of feminine pronouns to refer to ships has been condemned as "demeaning to women,"  though I'm not sure how influential the condemnation - made a quarter century ago - has been.

  JL

"Gordon, Matthew J." <GordonMJ at MISSOURI.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Gordon, Matthew J."
Subject: Re: Query: Why "she" in reference to a ship?
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Anne Curzan gives several examples of OE nouns (e.g. wif) behaving =
according to biological gender against their grammatical gender =
assignments in her book, Gender Shifts in the History of English (2003, =
Cambridge). I think she may also discuss similar examples of gender =
reassignment with inanimate nouns, but I don't have the book with me =
now.


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Laurence Horn
Sent: Tue 1/17/2006 6:38 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Query: Why "she" in reference to a ship?
=20
Again, even that's a necessary condition, it can't be
sufficient--it's not an accident that it's ships, cars, and countries
(each canonically conducted or piloted by a male "driver") that
retain their OE feminine in the form of a pronoun and not tables,
feathers, or whatever. (Sorry I don't know enough OE to come up with
actual examples of feminine OE nouns that are never anything but "it"
now, but virtually any will do other than the above short list.)

larry

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