Abolish antisexism rules! Long live the equivalence of people!
On Sat, Nov 14, 1998 at 09:44:20PM -0500, Mike Stroucken wrote:
> That sort of squabbling about whether 'he', 'man' exclude
> females keeps many English professors fed, but the issue is entirely
> subjective, since these words have traditionally have been used for
> gender-neutral situations.
Seconded! It's the thought that counts; by removing words and not the
intentions you just start a recursive process without a halting
condition: what do you use when insert-your-favourite-nonsexist-phrase
gets polluted by sexism? You recurse with another substitution!
Remember the time when Nelson Mandela (IIRC) was described as African
American?
> However anti-'sexism' has brought us such wonderful things in the
> English language like 'womyn', 'herstory',
person, per, pers (instead of he/she, his/her, his/hers; GNU gettext
manual)
E, Eir, Eirs (M.D Spivak: Joy of TeX)
Those hurt my ears. Although I am a man and therefore possibly
spoiled on this matter, I have no problems including the opposite sex
in the generic `man' and addressing the generic person as `she', when
appropriate. But I refuse to use artificial words where they add no
new semantics to the language!
BTW, if you're having problems with he's and she's, learn and use
Finnish! We have no such problems: everybody's just a `hän' (he/she)
and an `ihminen' (man as a species, but not man as a gender),
independent of her gender.
Antti-Juhani
--
Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho A7 <gaia@iki.fi> ** <URL:http://www.iki.fi/gaia/> **
The FAQ is your friend.
Trust the FAQ.
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