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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
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Organization: U Chicago -- Linguistics Dept
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 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