rvpalliende (12/11/82)
Any term which gives more information than strictly required is discriminatory. When a piece of news says "Woman professor won award" or "Black boy stole bike" or "Jewish merchant set free" they are giving more information than required and being discriminatory. If you use the word "actress" instead of "actor" you can't avoid informing the reader about the sex of the person, and therefore you are not being discriminatory. On the other hand, if you use "sen~or" the extra information could have been suppressed by either suppressing the title or by using the word "Mr.". Related issue: The Canadian Government (maybe it is the Ontario Government, I'm not sure) will stop using the discriminatory titles Mr. and Ms. (Mrs. is, of course, obsolete) People will be called John Smith or Jane Doe, or J. Smith, J. Doe, but never Mr. John Smith, Ms. Jane Doe. I think that in an egalitarian society titles of any kind are an anachronism.
rhm (12/12/82)
Well, we have a (perhaps not new) linguistic fact, namely that Mr., Sen~or, and presumably all other former titles of respect are now discriminatory and therefore contemptuous. Perhaps I was brought up in a different age. When I was a child, to call an adult or a stranger "Jones" or "Alliende" would have been considered grossly rude and would have been rebuked. I have retained this habit. If I do not call someone by his first name, I either say "Mr./Mrs./Miss Jones" or "Sir or Ma'am". To address Mr. Jones as "Jones" still carries the strong implication that he is my servant or my inferior. (to rvp: I have no servants.) Having been rather fluent in Spanish from youth, to refer to Pablo Alliende as "Mr. Alliende" grates on my ear - perhaps it shouldn't.
zrm (12/13/82)
Headline: Nondescript entity objects! Lets reduce each other to colourless odorless sexless people units. Clearly this is some pinko Canadian plot to kill us off through boredom, or at least reduce the information content of the language so that we are reduced to savagry because we no longer communicate with one another. The most interesting parts of a great deal of news, memos, business letters, etc. are the clues about the persons involved in those communications. Leaving that out, and enforcing the omission by laws and rules, would make a mockery of attempting to say something through these very constricted media. Cheers, Zig
rvpalliende (12/13/82)
Having lived in a country where foreigners are thought of as equals (if not superior by some little minds) sentences like "el sen~or Smith" or "la sen~ora Scott" don't sound strange to me at all. Naively I supposed that here I would be "Mr. Alliende". That's the way all my correspondence with the University was addressed. It seems that for some people it's important to call a person in a way that everybody realizes that he or she is not an American with a foreign name. But, on the other hand, I've never heard the word for "Mr." in Polish, or Italian, or Cantonese in an English context (and Brezhnev is continually referred to as "Mr. Brezhnev"). If you don't want to seem contemptuous by using just the last name, the full name will do. (E.g. "Dear Ann Landers", never "Dear Landers", and "Dear Ann" may be too familiar) (Mr.) Pablo Alliende.