Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site sphinx.UChicago.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!mhuxn!ihnp4!gargoyle!sphinx!mmar From: mmar@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP (Mitchell Marks) Newsgroups: net.nlang,net.women Subject: Re: Pronouns devoid of gender connotations Message-ID: <743@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP> Date: Fri, 28-Jun-85 03:29:22 EDT Article-I.D.: sphinx.743 Posted: Fri Jun 28 03:29:22 1985 Date-Received: Sat, 29-Jun-85 02:24:34 EDT References: <2718@decwrl.UUCP>, <498@rtech.UUCP> Organization: U Chicago -- Linguistics Dept Lines: 141 Xref: watmath net.nlang:3290 net.women:6134 jeff@rtech.UUCP (Jeff Lichtman) in Message-ID: <498@rtech.UUCP> writes: > > "If you should happen to see someone, say hello to one." Sorry, the problem > still exists. The suggested answers usually fall into one of the following > categories: > > Use the plural: ^^^^^^ Let's hold off judgement on what this is, and identify it by the actual forms involved: they, them, their, theirs, and either themselves (as you might expect) or themself (as you in fact hear often). The last peculiarity leads to the argument I've offerred here before, that this process is not really using plurals to agree with an indefinite, but rather letting the forms "they" etc be used AS SINGULARS when anaphoric to an indefinite. > > "If you should happen to see someone, say hello to them." > > The argument here is that English is a flexible language > that is defined by usage, and this is how many people > already talk. Also, getting rid of sexist language is > more important than adherance to abstract rules of grammar. Distinguish """rules""" as promulgated by prescriptivists from the rules which would constitute a description of the actual language. Then the two points collapse together: advocates of this usage in fact SUPPORT adherence to the (real) abstract rules of grammar, i.e. the grammar that people use. BTW, this isn't a special characteristic of English. Any language changes under the friction of actual use, even those with a National Academy or other conservative force. > > Invent a new word: > Stick with "Standard English": > > "If you should happen to see someone, say hello to him." > > The argument here is that this is gramatically correct, > and has served for many years. Sort of; in any event that's how proponents of this option would put it. But what that means in this context is mostly "this is what has traditionally been urged". What has to be argued out about this option is whether there's anything wrong with it. After all, a normative grammarian urging this would not be able to stop others from speaking however they want, e.g. using "they" -- as S. Pemberton's citations from the OED pointed up, that alternative has survived for 600 years. What has happened is that the shoe is on the other foot. This Standard usage has come under attack from feminists as inherently reflecting assumptions about sex roles (including people like me who take a descriptivist stand and write words like "normative" and "prescriptive" with an ugly leer, yet feel no contradiction in becoming rather prescriptive ourselves as part of a social program. There's no real contradiction, and I'll happily defend that combination of stances some other time, if anyone bothers to flame me as a hypocrite). So the controversy doesn't center around that seemingly straightforward argument for the "he/him" normative standard. Rather, the issue has become the defense of it as not really reflecting assumptions about sex roles, and counterattacks to those defenses. The most frequently offerred defense, and a pretty cogent one, is that its origins are in the arbitrary and fairly innocent system of grammatical gender, which has largely died out in English leaving just this relict. But that defense won't quite do, for two reasons: (1) The history is not actually all that innocent. We term this grammatical subsystem 'gender', and call two of the genders 'masculine' and 'feminine', because in fact they largely agree with natural gender for animals and especially humans. The fact that masc is generally the unmarked gender (in the European languages for which this terminology was developed) may reflect an attitude within the speech community that it was in some way normal or 'default' to be male or to talk about males, and somewhat peculiar or out-of-the-ordinary to be female or to talk about females. (2) And in any event, Modern English hardly has any arbitrary grammatical gender -- it's always in accord with natural gender with a couple moribund exceptions. Thus "he" always carries with it the meaning 'male' today, even if at one time it did not. > > Name both genders: > > "If you should happen to see someone, say hello to him or her." > > This is an easy transformation that is always possible, > is easy, and is correct even to a strict grammarian. > Yes indeed. Sometimes it's rather clumsy, though, and becomes tedious not just to over-sensitive stylists but to anybody. There's nothing clumsy about it in Jeff's example, but you can easily construct examples where you have to use the formula two or three times in a sentence and five or six times in a paragraph, and that becomes very ugly very quickly. We've been looking at the same kind of example throughout. If you vary it a bit, you can easily find cases where this (or a coinage, or eliminating the need for a pronoun) are the only viable options: i.e., where neither "one" nor "you" nor "they" works. > Stick with standard English, but re-phrase: > > "Say hello to whomever you should happen to see." > ... Compare _A_Manual_of_Style_ (University of Chicago Press) 12th ed with _The_Chicago_Manual_of_Style_ (adopted as new official name) 13th ed, for an example of a massive job of this sort of rewriting. > > Have I missed any categories? Yes: 6) Use "she" (and related forms in other cases) consistently. Despite my abstract convictions, I admit this was quite startling the first time I saw it. But more people are trying it out, and you really do get used to it. For an example of a work that carries this policy through, see Cooper and Clancy _Oh!_Pascal!_. This does not exclude using "you" or "one" (or "we" or "they") where they will work, but rather just selects "she" over "he" or "she or he" where nothing but one of those would work. 7) Use "she" and "he" alternately or randomly from one work to another, or from one passage to another. As with option (6), this does not exclude the other alternatives when they will work. So far as I know, this suggestion was first publicly aired by J. D. McCawley in a review of Robin Lakoff's _Language_and_Woman's_Place_ (1975). I had never seen it actually carried out in anything like strict alternation until last week. The book that I stumbled upon which appears to do this (the author doesn't make a big point of it in a note or anything) is _The_Nature_of_Mathematical_Knowledge_ by Philip Kitcher (Oxford U.P. 1984). He switches back and forth like clockwork, with only one exception that I've noticed so far. I mean each passage or example, not each instance of a pronoun. (He also uses most of the other options discussed above, as well as the philosophers' oddity of sometimes writing "I" to mean something like 'any rational being'.) Any Minnesotans out there? Ask him if the strict alternation was as intentional as it looks (and how the early exception happened). -- Mitch Marks @ UChicago ...ihnp4!gargoyle!sphinx!mmar