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From: buzzard@TheWorld.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: Feminine Curiosity
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Date: Sat, 2 Feb 2002 11:03:37 GMT
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L. Ross Raszewski <lraszewski@loyola.edu> wrote:
>Sean T Barrett <buzzard@TheWorld.com> wrote:
[snipping everything of mine except that with which
I want to reply, yes reply, to this followup]
>>I would rather cause some awkwardness in the reader's beliefs
>>for a moment, while giving them a reminder that yes, women
>>do this too, than preferentially use the male gendered pronoun
>>"that doesn't bother anybody", "that everybody accepts represents
>>an unspecified person", and that continues to reinforce a belief
>>that the average "typical" person is male.

>If I'm reading your sentence, and even for a moment, I
>have to pause and think about the way the sentence is constructed, due
>to a comma splice, or a faulty parallelism, or failed subject-verb
>agreement, then it distracts from your communication. If you break the
>flow of thought through a sentence, you do a lot to damage to
>continuity of the thought.

Yes, but all this requires you to do is reinterpret your
undertanding of a generic person into a generic female person.
It does not in any significant way change the meaning.

>Doing it *intentionally*, just to prove a point, then, seems to be
>sort of wrong. Like you're trying to sneak a political agenda into a
>conversation about something else.

Yes, well, not doing it seems to be sort of wrong. You're
operating under some kind of assumption here that "he"
doesn't do any of the bad things that I described above.
Maybe it doesn't for you; maybe you really do imaginine
a generic unspecificed 'he' as a person whose gender wave
function hasn't yet collapsed.

I figure, hey, maybe it's 5% of readers who "wrongly"
interpret "he" as being gendered; or maybe it's 95%.
I can't know which, but the cost for using "she" is
low, better safe than sorry.

As to sneaking a political agenda into a conversation:
the way language is changed is through use. I mean, sure,
I guess I could buy myself a blackboard and write on it
over and over again "A person should not use the pronoun
'he' to refer to a generic person if she wants to contribute
to the cause", but the point is that language is changed
through *public* use.

Indeed, one of the reasons I started doing it more consistently
was because I read the aforementioned book and found that
is was perfectly readable once you got used to the idea.
I tend to think of the form as advancing an over-specified
archetypical person for each case; the gender-specification
is unnecessary, but it doesn't harm my comprehension because
I can accept a female or a male as representative of the
whole population. Whether a similar thing occurs with the
use of "he" is the point of the debate, and simply writing
it off by saying "'he' doesn't mean that" (in the sense of
"that's not what 'he' is *supposed* to mean") ignores the
crucial issue.

SeanB
