I was directed toward this blog post over at Hot Air, and I'm commenting on it more out of amusement than because it really matters. It's yet another screed about wokeness:
[New York] Governor Kathy Hochul signed a new law last week that is banning a significant number of words from any use in government documents or speech. All of the targeted words carry an implication of gender. One of the most prominent examples she pointed out was “salesman.”¹...So just in case you were thinking that the crazy train might be slowing down a bit, have no fear. It’s still running full steam ahead in the Empire State.
....In a separate bill, Hochul approved a measure banning the use of gendered terms when referring to office-holders in local legislative bodies. The prime example in that new law was an instruction to change “councilman” to “council member.”
....Part of this is being driven by the agenda of transgender culture, of course, but not all of it. There is clearly a much broader goal among progressives that would see the end of the recognition of the obvious (and wonderful) differences between men and women. I assume this has something to do with “fighting the patriarchy” or whatever the flavor of the week is among liberals today.
New York may be on a kick to replace gendered language in its statutes, but this is hardly an invention of the woke generation. It's been going on since at least the '70s, which is where we got terms like flight attendant, garbage collector, and firefighter.
As for "fighting the patriarchy," it may be enjoying a revival but it's also ancient. We were all talking about that back when I was in college. (And earlier, but I don't think my high school was enlightened enough to be fighting the patriarchy or much of anything else.)
Even they/them, although it's also enjoying a revival, is old stuff. And none of this is meant to end recognition of the differences between men and women. It's meant to make sure that job titles don't simply assume that certain jobs are by default populated only by men (fireman, salesman) or women (stewardess, seamstress).
Wokeness can certainly get out of hand. But gender neutrality is hardly a good example of this. It's been a goal of the feminist movement practically since the beginning, and it's made steady progress for more than 50 years. It's just common sense, not a plot by the deep progressive state.
¹For what it's worth, this law was aimed at changing the word "salesman" to "salesperson" in an old statute about realtors. That's it. Hardly a big deal.
Someone alerr Chris Rufo: there's a white man hegemon bridge too far for Antiwoke martyr Kevin Drum.
*alert
I mostly agree with Kevin here, but the use of "their" instead of "his" (or her) in place of the 3rd person possessive when gender is unknown still grates*. It's just inelegant. A better shift would've been for writers to simply use whichever they prefer for themselves. In other words use both "his" and "her" (but not "his or her" although even that is preferable to "their" to my ears). I do see a lot of writers using "her" sometimes, though (but never "his").
(*From what I understand, the use of "their" in this sense is actually pretty old—as in centuries old—and was likely increasing in any event. But in formal, standard English, the line was being held. Until the 1980s or so.) And yes, this fight has long since ended. At least society did manage to dodge the "herstory" bullet. So it's not all bad!
FWIW I try to use "one" and "one's" whenever possible for the above reason. Maybe it sounds stuffy to American ears. That's their problem.
Hmmm. So your use of language might sound stuffy but that's their problem, but someone else's use of language is inelegant and grates and that's apparently also their problem? 🙂
(FWIW, I'm with you on the use of "one" which ought to be more common than it is. But I'm also perfectly fine with singular 'they' - I'm willing to bet that you've read lots of articles that use it properly and thus you haven't noticed.)
Not that he would admit it, but Jasper Peking's exemption of himself from the stuffy unpleasance of language usage while condemning others for same is not unlike Berners delighting in the dove landing on Candidate Sanders's podium in 2016 but finding Dark Brandon cringe or Trumpers having Trump as Rambo flags on their walls but scoffing at Red Eyes joebiden memes.
I recently started working with two people who use "they" instead of Him or her". It was difficult to adjust, moreso than I ever found switching gendered pronouns for a friend who transitioned. But then it wasn't any more.
One adjusts, as one does. Life goes on after the change.
One adjusts, as one does. Life goes on after the change
No doubt. It's not the biggest deal in the world. And it's become common (depressingly so) even in ostensibly formal writing*; but it's just so darn unnecessary given the existence of the perfectly fine English word "his" (or, if you prefer, "her").
*I use it myself, depending on the audience. I'm well aware some regard "his" in this instance as sexist, and it's no skin off my nose if they have bad judgment on these things. Happy to oblige! Indeed, I'm not arguing for the use of "his" over "their." I'm arguing for the use of "his" or "her" over "their." Using one's own third person singular possessive pronoun would've allowed us to avoid sexist language and eschew the barbarity of lack of number agreement. Anyway, it's not so much a losing battle as one that's been lost. Sigh.
“His” for a person of unspecified gender prioritizes accuracy in number over accuracy in gender.
“Their” for a person of unspecified gender prioritizes accuracy in gender over accuracy in number.
Since our society has a long history of invidious discrimination against people of one particular gender but no history of discrimination against singularity, I see accuracy in gender as more important than accuracy in number. Others are entitled to their own opinion.
Thanks, Tree -- this is exactly what I wanted to say.
Have a daughter or gender-neutral kid and you would (or should) think twice about defaulting to "he."
“His” for a person of unspecified gender prioritizes accuracy in number over accuracy in gender.
Not so. It prioritizes accuracy in number over giving offense wrt gender. Which is why, as I stated above, I urge people to use his or her. It was the obvious solution staring us in the face.
That way we can have our cake (number accuracy) and eat it (gender accuracy). I'm certainly not advocating gratuitously giving offense...
The law itself is irrelevant. It means nothing. A waste of time by morons who shouldn't be in power.
Irregardless that English is a constantly evolving hodgepodge, the singular use of their/them/they still triggers latent desire in you for the Goldwater-Miller presidential ticket, so it has got to go.
How do you feel about the use of "you" as a singular second person pronoun? Art thou with George Fox on this?
The desperation of straight, white, “Christian” men at seeing three centuries of affirmative action quotas favoring them would be laughable if it weren’t so pathetic.
These mediocrities have suffered from the soft bigotry of low expectations and it has not been good to them.
Errrr, dude, that makes no sense as such quotes did not exist. When your kingdom and scientific fleet develops said products, you own the rights. Why weren't Nigerian scientific minds developing means of travel and production to colonialism Europe????
A nostril rip would serve you well. Stop denying history.
One response of a small set of insecure European American males to the loss of sexist privilege is to become transgender female but identify as lesbian so they can reap the notability now available to women.
Woke is more than that. Woke Christianity, Republicans worship to is the same con that gender neutrality is. A lie that needs culled.
Years ago… 10 or 20+… no one would have ever noticed something like this. It’s a trivial thing, but blogs, social media, etc. turn every little thing into some culture war nonsense requiring comment and pushback. Kevin Drum noted the other day he’s been blogging for 20 years. I’m sure he’s had some fun and made some money along the way, but the whole movement to blog and comment on trivia has been destructive. It presumed good faith would rule the discourse. It was completely and catastrophically wrong.
I think Mr. Drum recently wrote about partisan hatred and conflict and pointed to a point around 2000 when Fox News took off. Well, 20 years ago… blogs. Talk radio (which goes back further) also had a hand in this. So blog person, I think you and your friends owe us all an apology.
I am happy to see so many opinion go to pay walls or refuse entry if you have an ad blocker. It makes life easier.
How about firegirls????
The blog phenomenon definitely boosted the tendency of pundits to elevate themselves to undeserving polymath status, as with Matty Church & Baseball Hipster being simultaneously experts in epidemiology, foreign relations, economics, abortion, etc.
> Years ago… 10 or 20+… no one would have ever noticed something like this.
I don't think we live on the same planet.
I know I'm not the only one who went to college in the 90s here. "Political Correctness" was the term of art that occupied the same political-semantic territory then.
Being PC, much like being Woke, implied you wouldn't be voting Republican. It was less focused on race, more on feminism and acceptance of gayness.
As far as things like this being too trivial for notice, I remember:
- (guess what?) People bitching about gender-neutral written language
- People bitching about "African-American" instead of "black"
- multiple rounds of national attention being directed at whether or not animate blobs in television cartoons were gay or not
- an article worried about boys who were worried about "turning gay" not wanting to wash their butts
People have always been obsessed with trivialities.
The material difference today is simply that the miracle of modern technology ensures local trivialities can efficiently upset more people, faster than ever before.
Be sure to thank an engineer for that!
+1
Here's my screed, not against wokeness in general, but about how silly some of this stuff can be. A client's payroll system has 25+ different genders to choose from. They wanted to know if I knew of a system that allowed more options as some of the recent hires (cough, recent grads, cough) do not see their preferred gender in the choices. And "Other" is apparently hurtful.
I support people to live their lives however they want. But this is just bananas.
Twenty-five gender options? Have the pointyhead kkklowns in their ivory towers even agreed on the nomenkkklature of twenty-five genders to have them included on an HR list already?
This sounds like a Freakinomics style too good to factcheck story, a la Lemonjello & Orangello.
Anyway, how bout just have one radial dial next to gender that can be dealer's choice? The individual filling it out enters their preferred pronoun on the line using their keyboard. Or even leaves it blank, if their gender is, like Extreme, more than words.
Twenty-five??? Could you let us know what they all are?
I can see why this is a problem for data collection and analysis. The more options you have in a particular data entry field, the less likely you are to be able to use that field to do anything useful. "Reagan, can you pull up job satisfaction statistics for the 1 person who selected 'ze' as their preferred pronoun? I'd like to know how our ze-identifying workforce is fitting in with all the he's, she's, they's, xe's, and ve's we've got working here."
But I also don't see why the gender field can't simply be treated like how ethnicities are treated on the census forms. Free response, where the survey taker can write anything... and then a Census worker later on cleans it all up for their internal processes and dumps everyone's responses into "Caucasian," "Asian," "Latino", "Black", "Pacific Islander", "Other" etc. Like nothing stops anyone from writing "Martian" in that part of the Census form... and yet, nobody in national media outlets is flipping out over Census Bureau employees recording all 15 self-reported Martians nationwide as "Other" when they compile their stats. Just let gender non-binary people write whatever they want in the gender field - and keep it there when they refer back to it to see if The Man or whomever changed their answer after they clicked Submit - and let coders aggregate all freeform responses too small to justify a whole new subcategory being created for them as "Other."
I like the story of the guy who filled in the "Race" question with "400m".
That beats me putting "Italian-American" on my 1997 AP European History exam.
But "sex: often" still slays.
Newspeak then. Newspeak now. Newspeak tomorrow.
I do find it interesting that some like to conflate writing laws to apply to everyone is somehow denying the fact that people are different.
It's the same impulse to characterize "Black Lives Matter" as meaning "Only Black Lives Matter," even though nobody characterizes "Blue Lives Matter" as meaning "Only Blue Lives Matter." It's just performative assholery.
🙂🙂
I do think that "they" to refer to a single known individual is a relatively recent phenomenon, no? I know that Jane Austen et al. used the singular "they" but only to generalize or to refer to an unknown gender (e.g., "I would have everybody marry if they could do it properly"). "Everybody" is technically singular, but she's speaking generally.
I'm not complaining about it, but I do think individuals using "they/them" pronouns is new.
Just an anecdote from metro Philly, but I used "they" as a kid to describe people at the mall that I knew were "male" or "female" but were wearing the "wrong" clothing/hairstyle for their gender. (It was the 1980s.)
Today we are all pre-op &/or post-op Carmen on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
Let's just hope no one tries to beat Windell Middlebrooks's Black ass with a rod.
These discussions rarely get into the semantic and syntactic nuances. The old use of singular "they," which goes back to the King James Bible, has a grammatically singular but semantically plural antecedent: "Everyone took their seats." The use with an unquestionably singular person of unknown sex developed gradually, to the point where even the self-appointed purists only complained when it was brought to their attention, its use (even by the purists) usually sliding by unnoticed. You are correct that the singular they for a single person of known sex is quite recent, but my teenaged kids use it unselfconsciously. It is the future, if not already the present.
It is the future, if not already the present.
Future? It's definitely the present. When's the last time you read a sentence like "Every student was asked to bring his laptop."? I mean, careful writers of English rarely use such a form these days, for fear of giving offense, even though the construction was nearly ubiquitous (at least in formal writing) as recently as the 1970s, I think.
(Curiously, I do fairly frequently see the above written as "her" laptop. Apparently the traditional usage reinforces the patriarchy, so "her" is an acceptable alternative to "their" for the agreement sticklers among us.)
I think rrhersh is saying "the singular they for a single person of known sex" is "the future, if not already the present." Your example ("Every student was asked to bring their laptop") is the old use of singular they he mentions in his first paragraph (and that I cited from Jane Austen).
When I say "the singular they for a single person of known sex," I mean a nonbinary person using "they/them" as their pronoun.
Yes, I believe that using un gendered terms (police officer versus police man etc) is generally superior. However, being the language police (LatinX being the worst example) does not seem to be politically beneficial. Bottom line, I suggest treading lightly on the push to gender neutral terminology.
Thank you. "Latin Ex" always gets my hackles up. Why not just say "Hispanic", which is inherently non-gendered?
And the whole "Latin" thing is just weird. If it's meant to apply to people hailing from countries whose language is derived from "Latin", well then, that must include France. And to a surprising extent, England/Australia/New Zealand/Canada. But it doesn't.
And the whole "Latin" thing is just weird. If it's meant to apply to people hailing from countries whose language is derived from "Latin"
The reason it is is not applied to European nations with Latin roots is because the therm itself is the shortening of the term Latino America, or Latin America, which originally was used to describe only the American nations that used to be Spanish colonies.
Thank you. "Latin Ex" always gets my hackles up.
Hackles? It goes way beyond mere "hackles."
Among Hispanics, "Latinx" is widely regarded as a clunky, tone-deaf, historically and culturally incorrect neologism (an offensive one at that) concocted by white progressives (to such an extent it's quite literally hurt Democrats politically with such voters).
https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in-four-u-s-hispanics-have-heard-of-latinx-but-just-3-use-it/
FWIW, Hot Air is definitely a right wing site and I don’t “go there” often, but it honestly reported on the brouhaha regarding the supposed picture on Governor Northam and the black-face picture. It was the only place I saw that showed the picture in question wasn’t him:
https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2019/02/04/northams-classmate-party-wasnt-photo-n268034
It drove me crazy that I saw this on none of the liberal sites I frequent.
The same leftists who excoriate the Institutional Demokkkrat Party for not defenestrating Gov. Jolson will tell you that Christopher Mijares got what was coming to him & John Fetterman thus did nothing wrong.
The writer of the linked piece (Jazz Shaw?) apparently does not understand, or pretends not to understand, that it is the use of the masculine form of nouns or pronouns as the default which is objected to. As far as I know, there is no problem with finding or inventing a masculine, feminine or gender-non-specific form for nouns, for example "congressman", congresswoman" or "congressperson".
The problem comes with the pronouns. "They" can often by used when a specific person is not the subject, but can be confusing when talking about a specific person because it may confuse number (singular vs plural). I have seen "they are" used when referring to a person who does not want to be considered either male or female (masculine or feminine). Using "they" is generally not clarifying, it is confusing. We really need a greatly-expanded set of pronouns. The Democratic candidate for President in 2024 should probably campaign on this issue, to put an end to the squabbling between left and right about pronouns and related grammatical things.
" We really need a greatly-expanded set of pronouns."
A neutral single third person pronoun and posssive willfix most of the probems.
We already have them: they/their. The Kidz are using this unselfconsciously. We are in the transitional period of people complaining about it. English underwent the same process four hundred years ago with singular "you," for somewhat similar reasons.
"They" is now being used to denote a specific gender orientation (or non-orientation) in some contexts, number in some contexts, and lack of gender specificity in others. This is too much.
Number is a red herring. We get along just fine with singular "you," to the point that it is nerdy to know that it was ever different. As for the various gender interpretations, lack of specificity wins out. Yes, it may be that some individuals want it to mean something more narrowly defined, but they won't get what they want. The real kicker is that there is no alternative. Yes, people have proposed a myriad of new pronouns. None of the ever came even close to sticking. This is not how pronouns, or brain wiring, work. With no alternative, it will come to cover the general case. We might go through a phase of some people complaining that only non-binary persons should be called "they," but that will come to seem so 2030s and adorably quaint.
+1
Honestly, I've always been annoyed by the lack of a second-person plural in English, and most subcultures invent one. For instance, I live in Texas and still say "y'all" or "you all" even in professional situations. Some of my kin up north say "you guys." There have been several times where it's awkward to single someone out, and I wish there were a way to make that clear. So I respectfully disagree that we get along just fine without a second person plural. It's a defect in English that we find ways to get around.
One of the best example of this, when done successfully, and well, is "Ms." replacing Mrs. and Miss. It worked because fitting it in to language was more or less seamless, since "Mr." already did the job for males. There was still ridiculous conservative push back, but it ended up working.
Changing "him" or "her" to "their" is so difficult because, obviously, "their" already has another use, whereas "Ms." was a completely new concept. Ms. isn't even short for another word, like Mr. is for Mister.
I have noticed that its so difficult to replace him or her with thier that even an NPR interview show on non-binary people can't keep it up for more than five minutes, and they are trying to do so. Sooner or later someone drops in him or her an autopilot before they can self-correct.
I am unfamiliar with at least 20 of the 25 pronouns cited above, but I would say a completely new one is needed instead of their.
IIRC in Star Trek crew addressed female superior officers as "Sir". I suspect this is the way English will evolve, with "male" terms losing gender specificity. As has already happened with "guys".
Also too, with aliens on board of ambiguous, and possibly multiple, genders, what else could they do? Goes along TNG changing the line from "no man has gone before" to "no one". "Man" was species specific as well as gender specific.
Time for a basic question, in the US military branches is a female commanding officer "sir?" Shows how disconnected I am from anything military that I'm a 62 year old lawyer and I don't know.
For now its still Sir for men and Ma'am for women.
I think, from my reading of fiction (blush) that navies have been calling female officers "Mister" for a long time now. So Trek is just conforming to standard naval practice.
Speaking of "Where no one has gone before", my daughter was reared on Star Trek Next Generation. One day, she saw an old original series episode, and Kirk intoned "where no man has gone before" and she asked "Why can't none ladies go, too?"
When taking a modern grammar course at university in the middle 1970's a female student was severely critical of the domination of male pronouns in standard usage, which she considered sexist. The professor thought it was a distraction from the purpose of the course (my first introduction to Chomsky) but she was the most accomplished student in the class.
Amazing how insecure so many men are. Yeesh.
https://www.mattball.org/2022/06/everyone-fuck-patriarchy.html
I would like to give a dozen or so "likes" to your blog. At least, the intro.
Reminds of a similar event trying change "Fisherman" into "Fisherperson". Women in the industry would have none of it. That was sometime in the last century when I was still reading The National Fisherman.
The genderedness of English has been declining ever since ever since it began evolving into a sort of German-French creole in 1066. That's one of many aspects of grammar that were simplified when people who spoke different languages had to live together.
Just saying.
Arguably a Norse-French creole. There's a non-crazy case to be made that Middle English was really Old Norse with a heavy influence from the Mercian dialect of Anglo-Saxon, than the other way around (with yes, a massive influx of new vocabulary from Norman-French starting in the late 11th century).
https://www.sprach-und-literaturwissenschaften.uni-muenchen.de/studium/studienbuero/forschungsprojekte/bisherige-projekte/laberer.pdf
(To be sure, this thesis remains a minority view among experts in the field; but it's an intriguing idea nonetheless, and I'd argue isn't easily dismissible.)
Legal documents often have something called a "gender clause". It reads "The masculine shall include the feminine, and the singular shall include the plural." which sounds delightfully mystical and philosophical. It's almost as good as "I am what I am" which sounds like something from the Book of Job but is actually from Popeye.
I have no problem with getting gender out of language. It has been years since anyone was called a Jewess or Negress. I notice that actress is falling out of use as well, replaced by actor, and why not? It's the same work, and there's no reason an added syllable should mean a big cut in pay.
Then we'd better get rid of person and replace it by persibling.