Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site dciem.UUCP Path: utzoo!dciem!mmt From: mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor) Newsgroups: net.nlang,net.women Subject: Re: Pronouns devoid of gender connotations Message-ID: <1609@dciem.UUCP> Date: Mon, 1-Jul-85 13:57:06 EDT Article-I.D.: dciem.1609 Posted: Mon Jul 1 13:57:06 1985 Date-Received: Mon, 1-Jul-85 16:15:55 EDT References: <2718@decwrl.UUCP> <498@rtech.UUCP>Reply-To: mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor) Organization: D.C.I.E.M., Toronto, Canada Lines: 31 Summary: >7) Use "she" and "he" alternately or randomly from one work to > another, or from one passage to another. > > 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.... This was the solution my wife and I adopted in our "Psychology of Reading" (Academic Press, 1983), over the objections of the copy-editor, who wanted "he or she". We prevailed, because we felt strongly that "he or she" was very clumsy in practice. When the referent remained the same (real or abstract) person throughout a passage, the pronoun remained consistent. When the referent changed, so might the pronoun. Only where the sex of the referent was absolutely or probabilistically determined would the pronoun be fixed in advance (We did not refer to a dyslexic child as "she" unless we wanted to point out an exception to the general rule that most dyslexic children are male). It is very easy to get used to the generic "she", but I think it is better to balance "she" and "he" through a text. -- Martin Taylor {allegra,linus,ihnp4,floyd,ubc-vision}!utzoo!dciem!mmt {uw-beaver,qucis,watmath}!utcsri!dciem!mmt