chai@utflis.UUCP (03/21/86)
In article <845@cylixd.UUCP> charli@cylixd.UUCP (Charli Phillips) writes: >While we're on the subject, I find that the more extreme efforts to >avoid neutral "he" and "-man" sound both stilted and patronizing. How true. One of my profs, in his (he's really a man, you see :-) recent book about User Interfaces, uses "she" everywhere, as in "The user is shown a menu. She is expected to ...." Needless to say, it gives me a bit of a jar when I'm expecting the "he". I think this only draws attention to the problem instead of alluviating it. Solutions? I can't think of a good one. Now lemme tell you about third person pronouns in Chinese. Both "he" and "she" are pronounced the same, ( 'ta' ), but for "he", the character is written with a left radical derived from the character "person", whereas the left radical for "she" is derived from the character "woman". (the right radical is the same for both characters) So written Chinese is sexist, but not spoken Chinese. :-) -- Henry Chai ( guest on suran@utcsri ) {utzoo,ihnp4,allegra,decwrl}!utcsri!utflis!chai chai%utflis@TORONTO