Heard on the Olympics broadcast

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Sat Aug 9 18:49:04 UTC 2008


Karch Karalyi, commenting upon the American womens's beach-volleyball team:

"Her partner, [Nicole Branagh], is a real _stud_!"


I'm truly amazed and greatly pleased that the campaign to mess with
Sasquatch, as it were, and erase the last few traces of inherent
genderism from the English language has begun to bear such delicious
fruit.

Perhaps now is the time to project the campaign outward to such
languages as Russian. I can recall how shocked and disgusted we were
when, at the Army Language School, there were revealed to us such
examples of genderism as the fact that one is not permitted by the
grammar of Russian to say

*Ona (= Feminine) khoroshaia (= Feminine) chelovek "She [is a] nice person"

Rather, one *must* say:

Ona khoroshii (= Masculine) chelovek (= Masculine)

despite the fact that the subject is Feminine! What kind of shit is that?!

-Wilson
--
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
 -Sam'l Clemens

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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