Re: Abolish antisexism rules! Long live the equivalence of people!
> 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. "He" is the only
> pronoun proper to use for a general reference.
Another solution has been used by writers and speakers of English for
about as long as English has been around.
There are two slightly different circumstances when an English speaker
might want to use a genderless singular personal pronoun:
1. When they are referring to a singular member of a group of unknown
gender, such as what I'm doing in this sentence -- I know that any
particular English speaker can be male or female, so specifying "he" or
"she" implies a gender that isn't really there. This is the case that
people mean when they say "'He' is the only pronoun proper to use for a
general reference." However, historically, "they" has long been used
in that manner as well.
2. When they are referring to a particular person who's gender is
unknown. In this case, "he" or "she" would not be a general usage, but
would rather be a specific usage which may be incorrect. "I got a
visit from the CEO today", "Oh, what did he want", "_She_ wanted to
complement my use of non-sexist language in our documentation." Here,
English has a very long tradition of using "they". "Someone left their
coat behind". "I don't know who it was, but they won't get away".
So I would recommend to use "they", if you need to use a genderless
singlular personal pronoun. There is a web page which I will try to
find again, listing uses of singluar "they" throughout lots of classic
English literature, including Shakespeare and Jane Austin.
>
> Politically correct speech or writing just makes its author look foolish.
If it is obvious that that is what the author is doing. If they just
write natural English speach, it can be quite...natural.
>
> If you don't like this, learn Finnish, as Antti-Juhani said.
>
> --
> Oliver Elphick Oliver.Elphick@lfix.co.uk
> Isle of Wight http://www.lfix.co.uk/oliver
> PGP key from public servers; key ID 32B8FAA1
> ========================================
> "It is better to trust in the LORD than to put
> confidence in man." Psalms 118:8
>
>
>
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--
Buddha Buck bmbuck@acsu.buffalo.edu
"Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our
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