Re: Abolish antisexism rules! Long live the equivalence of people!
"Oliver Elphick" <olly@lfix.co.uk> writes:
> john@dhh.gt.org wrote:
> >Or do as Feynman did in his textbooks: randomly switch back and forth
> >between 'he' and 'she'
>
> Remind me never to read Feynman. Such writing is bad English; it reads
> awkwardly. If you see "she" in a text, you expect that pronoun to refer
> to a specific woman who has been mentioned previously, or to a member
> of the whole class of women, ships or female animals.
I hope that John actually meant that the first time a person was
introduced, they would be male and referred to as "he", then when
_another_ person was introduced they would be female, not that their
sex would change mid-sentence.
In any case, I just picked a random chapter (15) of Feynman's Lectures
on Physics, and the only pronoun I came across was "he".
--
Carey Evans http://home.clear.net.nz/pages/c.evans/
Close your eyes.
Reply to: