Age and gender confusion at the Olympics

[Joel S. Berson]

I speculate that as the author was writing he was pronouncing his
sentence as "Hay is also a favorite ...", rather then "Hee was ...",
and so was not aware of possible confusion in his readers.  Another
way for him to avoid confusion might have been to write "Ms. He was
...", or in some other way the move He to within the sentence,

Joel

At 8/15/2008 09:54 PM, Mark Mandel wrote:
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
>ISTM that the Globe should have used the gymnast's full name both times, or
>throughout the story, to avoid confusion.
>
>m a m
>
>On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 8:28 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
>
> > Yes, Larry, for the first sentence I quoted, and for the prior
> > context of the article, which does put one into the *women's*
> > gymnastic team with several "she"s or "her"s.  But I was mentally
> > delayed by the *second* sentence, where "He" is the first word -- and
> > I did not immediately think of  or pronounce the name of God or the
> > Chinese female gymnast, but rather the more frequent masculine pronoun.
> >
> > Joel
> >
> > At 8/15/2008 07:57 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
> > >At 7:35 PM -0400 8/15/08, Joel S. Berson wrote:
> > >>A Boston Globe story today on the "issue" of the age of some Chinese
> > >>women gymnasts has the following in a mid-article paragraph:
> > >>
> > >>"If the age reported by Xinhua was correct, that would have meant He
> > >>was too young to be on the Chinese team that beat the United States
> > >>Wednesday and clinched China's first women's team Olympic gold in
> > >>gymnastics.  He is also a favorite for gold in Monday's uneven bars
> > final."
> > >>
> > >>The second sentence above fazed me for a few seconds -- I had to
> > >>re-read and mentally re-pronounce it.
> > >>
> > >>Joel
> > >Especially if you hear it out loud.  When you read it on the
> > >page/screen, you realize it must be either about God (who can be any
> > >age or gender) or some female Chinese gymnast named He.  But there is
> > >a certain "Who's on First" flavor about it, I have to concede.
> > >
> > >LH
> >
>
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org