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From: buzzard@TheWorld.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: Feminine Curiosity
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Matthew Russotta:
>Making language perfectly safe and nonconfusing for
>children is not a valid goal.

I can't prove to you that adult readers see 'he' and
envision a likely-male not-quite-generic human being.
I can only offer evidence that suggests that this is
likely. The likeliness of this is sufficient to justify
the behavior, since, as I have noted, the cost of
altering the language is minimal.

I'm sorry that I wasn't sufficiently clear about this in
the text from which you excerpted, none of the rest of
which was about children.

I'm not sure what you hope to accomplish by posting
this sort of thing; somebody posted asking why some
people do this; I've posted to explain why I do it,
and tried to be quite clear what my motivation is,
but I haven't asked anyone else to do so. I have a
perfectly valid goal; so what is the point of your
post? I don't think I'm actually "in danger" of
convincing anyone else to do this, so I don't think
you need to go around "saving" them from "making the
mistake" of subscribing to my "political agenda".

If you think I'm an idiot, on the other hand, you can
feel free to email me to say so; but I don't see much
point on filling the group with it.

SeanB
