Subject: cetacean sexism

[Jonathan Lighter]

Mark, I can see why you call it a WAG rather than a SWAG.  Like most decent
suggestions about anything, it's unlikely but hardly implausible.

Acc. to the possibly correctly informed blog at[
http://ididnotknowthatyesterday.blogspot.com/2007/01/why-are-boats-and-ships-always-referred.html]
(Jan.19, 2007), "The shipping industry newspaper, Lloyd's List, now
officially refers to ships as 'it.' So much for the romance of the open
sea."

JL

On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 1:53 PM, Mark Mandel <thnidu at gmail.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Mark Mandel <thnidu at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Subject: cetacean sexism
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Here's my WAG. If folks here think it's reasonable, maybe it's not all so
> wild-ass after all:
>
> I have long thought, without any evidence (nor do I know how any might be
> found, if it exists), that sailors' use of the feminine pronoun for the
> ship
> originated at least partly from the pragmatics of discourse. Here is a
> speech community consisting entirely of males, speaking a language with
> three pronoun genders. All the persons present are "he"; all the objects
> are
> "it". The only referents for standard "she" are remote, represented only by
> reference in occasional discourse, while the most important single object
> in
> their lives, which they depend on for their very lives as well as for their
> living and everything they own and use, is the ship. There seems to be a
> valuable economy in having the ship be the default referent for the
> feminine
> pronoun.
>
> A similar argument could be made for the object of the hunt.
>
> Mark A. Mandel
>
> On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 10:43 AM, Amy West <medievalist at w-sts.com> wrote:
>
> > On 7/6/10 12:02 AM, Automatic digest processor wrote:
> > > Date:    Mon, 5 Jul 2010 22:07:12 -0400
> > > From:    Jonathan Lighter<wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> > > Subject: cetacean sexism
> > >
> > > A viewing of John Huston's vastly underrated film of_Moby Dick_  (1956)
> > > raises the question of why whales should be generically female.  Even
> > when
> > > it's pretty sure to be Moby, the lookout cries "There she blows!"
> > >
> > > I don't know what they say in Japanese or Norwegian (probably something
> > like
> > > "I have a sonar contact"), but this familiar English usage seems not to
> > have
> > > been commented on.
> > >
> > > JL
> >
> > Good question!
> >
> > The OE word, hwael is masculine, so that's not the answer. Is it simply
> > extending the ship gender usage? And I just recently learned that that
> > usage is comparatively recent (1700s) (did I learn that here?).
> >
> > --
> > ---Amy West
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
>  > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
> >
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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