Subject: cetacean sexism

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:18 AM -0400 7/6/10, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>Amy, you couldn't have learned it here because it looks wrong. OED includes
>an ex. from Barbour in 1375. It was/is also applied to vehicles (as in
>Wilson's implied "Fill 'er up!").
>
>Pre-19th C. exx. appear to be mainly Scottish, if that means anything.
>
>I'm going to start acronyming "if that means anything" as "ITMA."  Too lazy
>to see if it's being done elsewhere.

Semantic overlap with FWIW, no?

>
>I've run across various wacky rationalizations (disapproving and otherwise)
>for why ships were once expected to be called/ should be called/ must never
>be called "she."

Some at least implicitly disapproving ones come from feminist
treatments of linguistic asymmetries, in which the argument goes that
the pilot, controller, subject, etc. is "he" so the vessel, object
controlled, object, etc. must be "she", which works for ships, cars,
planes, and so on (maybe even countries, qua ships of state), but not
directly for whales, where presumably it's the "he" as
hunter/predator vs. "she" as hunted/wily prey metaphor that comes
into play.

>
>A tangential fave:  Richard Howells, *The Myth of the Titanic* (N.Y.: St.
>Martin's, 1999), pp.75-76, finds the application of the pronouns *she* and *
>her* to ships treacherous and objectionable because, through their use, ships
>like the *Titanic *"become a person rather than just a mechanical
>object....It follows, then, that when the *Titanic* is damaged in collision
>with the iceberg,  it feels physical pain....[I]n its 'last agony,' one 'saw
>her stagger and reel above the waters.' Finally, the ship descends not
>simply to the bottom of the sea, but, rather, to its 'grave.'"

Or, more perspicuously, its watery grave.  In fact I was thinking for
a moment that "watery" is pretty much restricted to such graves, but
I see it collocates freely with other delightful nominals from "eyes"
to "discharge".

LH

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