Age and gender confusion at the Olympics

[Douglas G. Wilson]

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> Subject:      Re: Age and gender confusion at the Olympics
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>
> 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,
Pinyin "he" would be more like "huh" (to my Anglophone ear), I think ...
which doesn't at all vitiate the above.

I also did a double-take BTW. After all, a little gender confusion is
nothing new to the Olympics.

Probably putting "Ms." or otherwise clarifying would violate the
company's style rules and generate angry letters from persons "offended"
for various reasons.

Moving it to within the sentence would be reasonable IMHO. But such care
would be foreign to the Internet, surely.

-- Doug Wilson

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