cbostrum (05/01/83)
<flame on> This is getting ridiculous. I have never seen so much stupid
argument in favour of the existing sexist structures in our language as I
have seen in the past little while in this group.
Issue: I argued that some people failed to see the point when they suggested
the discussion was more appropriate in net.nlang. They still fail to see the
point and have tirelessly continued to give irrelevant argument based on
word origins. Argue this if you wish in net.nlang, but not here.
Issue: the comparison with the terms "black" and "negro" is totally unwarranted
since these terms do not carry with them any serious semantics overtones. I am
really getting upset with seeing this used all the time. Similarly, will the
idiots contributing the "chairpersibling" and similar crap just grow up? I am
prepared to admit to feminists that "chairman" is sexist, but I will agree with
some contributions here that education could solve the problem since there are
not neccessary semantic overtones of maleness here.
Issue: Few of the contributors have noticed the fact that education or
nothing short of change of the language, however, will solve the problem
with pronouns. Again, trying to make "he" a *homonym* causes it to have
more characteristics other than a lexical placeholder. Try this on:
I can say, without serious problems, "Julie is the chairman of the
committee and she thinks...". The feminists might argue that it should be
chairperson; I think that is going too far. But I cant say, "Julie is the
chairman of the committee, and he thinks..."!
This shows that the one homonym of "he" is *not* a genderless pronoun but can
only be used to denote a women when one does not know that it is a women
that is being denoted!! And further note that ridiculous way things work in
that, if I use "he" correctly in the present sense, referring to Julie qua
chairman (say I dont know she is a woman), while talking to someone, he
would feel obliged to correct me. All of this augurs very ill for the
claim that our language is not sexist. We are FORCED to refer to gender
whenever any of us involved in the conversation is aware of what it is,
EVEN IF IT IS IRRELEVANT! and THE CLAIM THAT GENDER IS NEVER IRRELEVANT,
WHICH IS NECESSARY IN ORDER TO PROTECT THIS PIECE OF USAGE IN OUR LANGUAGE,
IS THE BIGGEST PIECE OF SEXIST CRAP I HAVE EVER HEARD. So much for our
"the language is not sexist" claims.
<flame mildly subdued until next time>
Calvin Ostrum, Dept Computer Science, University of Waterloo
...{decvax,allegra,utzoo}!watmath!watdaisy!cbostrum
(note different machine ^^^^^^^^)