"Neanderthal/ ~tal"

[Laurence Horn]

At 6:47 AM -0700 10/27/06, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>Thanks for using all those phonemic  symbols, Doug. Some of 'em are
>actually the same as IPA!
>
>   Now the bad news : Google finds 100,000 exx. of "Beijing duck."
>There seem to be a few thousand for "Beijing Man" (correctly,
>"Beijing Person"), but most of these just refer to a guy who lives
>in Beijing.
>...
And for those of you who don't also subscribe to the Forensic
Linguistics list, it might be of interest to know what "Beijing
Person" may actually designate.  In response to a posting by Peter
Tiersma concerning a recent case in California,

>  > There is an interesting interpretive maxim (I discuss it in my
>book on Legal Language at p.73) that the Masculine shall include the
>Feminine, so that "he" in a statute or other legal text is read as
>"he or she".  The situation is complicated by the more recent trend
>to use "he or she" in legislation.
>  >         An interesting recent case involving this maxim was
>reported in the Los Angeles Times (Sara Lin, Only Men Can Be
>Flashers, Judge Says, L.A. Times, Oct. 21, 2006, at B6).  According
>to Judge Robert Armstrong of Riverside County, California, a penal
>code provision making it illegal for a person to "expose his person"
>to someone else did not apply to a woman who exposed her person to a
>young man who was annoying her by playing basketball outside her
>house.   What's interesting is that section 7 of the Calif. Penal
>Code specifically states that "words used in the masculine gender
>include the feminine and the neuter."  Did the prosecutors not know
>about this provision and fail to mention it to the judge? ...

another poster, Kim Burton, points out the following:

I am not entirely sure that this case is about "he or she", as I
believe that in indecent exposure laws the word "person" specifically
means "penis". For instance, in Chapter 8 of a 1985 Report on
Vagrancy and Related Offences by the Irish Law Reform Commission
http://www.lawreform.ie/publications/data/volume4/lrc_30.html
we find the following:

     Under section 4 of the Vagrancy Act 1824 every person "wilfully,
openly, lewdly and obscenely exposing his person in any street, road
or public highway, or in the view thereof, or in any place of public
resort, with intent to insult any female" is guilty of an offence
punishable with a maximum of three months' imprisonment. This offence
is confined to exposure by a male to a female and requires an intent
to insult. In the English case of Evans v Ewals it was held that
"person" means "penis" and  does not refer to other parts of the body.

LH

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