phw (07/08/82)
After having read a god-awful number of articles dealing with
gender, sexism, etymology, linguistics, and recursion,
I decided to add to all this stupidity with some of my own:
Our society has and does support sexism in many serious ways.
The two sexes in our culture are segregated by their peers, school systems,
families, television, etc.
In other words, we as MEN and WOMEN are creating the problem.
Word usage plays a minor role in the overall scheme of things.
What we must change is people! NOT what they say or write. You men out
there...every time you write an article to the net, take 10 seconds to say to yourselves,
"women and men are equal." And all you women out there, every time you
write, think about a time when you should have stood up for your rights
as a human being and didn't because of sexist attitudes either on your part
or on the parts of others, and then RESOLVE IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN!
Maybe then we can devote our linguistic efforts to the differences
between a "word" and a "word in the context ov a language."
Patrick H. Wood (male, i.e., XY chromasomes)
Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc.
Whippany, NJ 07981
...!mhtsa!mhuxv!whuxa!phw