Subject: cetacean sexism

[Mark Mandel]

Umm, without that second sentence ;-) I wouldn't know whether you meant that
as praise or criticism. Wiktionary <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/SWAG>:

   1. speculative wild-ass  guess
   2. scientific wild-ass guess
   3. Special Warfare Action Group *[hardly!] *

m a m

On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 2:44 PM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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
> > >
> >
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> > 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."
>
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