[clug] Google compared to latest Microsoft evilness

[Francis James Whittle]

On Tue, 2009-07-14 at 20:55 +1000, Jacinta Richardson wrote:
> Be aware that if you choose to use "he", "man" and "men" as gender neutral terms
> that a very large portion of your audience will not see those terms as gender
> neutral and will instead view you as being exclusionary.  I agree that they were
> historically used as if gender neutral, but I think that has a lot more to do
> with the relative positions of men and women historically, plus the gendered
> nature of most European languages, than the correctness in doing so.  Words are
> political beasts.  ;)

Oddly enough this should only apply to "his" and "him" (and also "man"
if you want a noun).  The gender-neutral term covering the nominative
and accusative cases was "hit" in Old English (now the derived "it") – I
think a larger portion of the audience will take offence to being
referred to as "it" though.
Curiously I've never found any information about a neutral plural term
(like 'we' or 'they') except that "him" (I guess "them" is a derived
term) also applied here for all genders; I assume the language used the
masculine terms hiē (they) and hiera (their) were used in the mixed or
neutral case here.

On the other hand wermann and wifmann are very clearly distinguished,
and the neutral term is mann (from which man is derived).  A logical
modern equivalent to the masculine form is either weman or wereman (or
even herman), but for some unknown reason that didn't happen and now the
word "man" is broken.
We also have oddities such as not actually being able to refer to a male
spouse in one word with a gender-specific term – "Husband" is derived
from the words for house and dweller (and in itself may not necessarily
refer to a male, although it probably will).

> Many of the Christian clergy will tell you that when Jesus spoke of his "Father"
> he was referring to a familial position of respect rather than making a specific
> declaration of God's gender.  They will assert that we say He and His with
> respect to God as a common language short hand without implying that God has a
> gender.  Yet the vast majority of people view God as male because of our
> language about Him and associated imagery.  To talk about God in a feminine
> sense is (and has been for a few centuries) an unusual, almost rebellious thing
> to do, verging on blasphemy to some.

Others would argue that since Jesus the Nazarene already had a mother,
"father" made more sense.  Also it's easier to say than "omniscient
parental figure," presumably even in Hebrew (and you *have* to choose
one or the other in Latin).

> I would rather redraft what I am writing a few times in order to make sure it
> says what I mean, and to make sure that most people will understand it to mean
> the same thing, than use language short-cuts that cause parts of my target
> audience to feel excluded.  Not to miss that using "he" in a gender neutral
> sense can lead to some very strange sentences:
> 
> 	Before starting the procedure the doctor must ask the patient if he has
> 	any contra-indicating issues such as pregnancy, breast-feeding, high
> 	blood pressure or haemophilia.

I'm a big fan of just blurting out what comes into my head, but in
formal writing where the gender of the subject is indeterminate I'll
tend to stick with ‘they’ and derivative words ­– the doctor must ask
the patient if they have blah blah blah.
Not to mention that ‘he’ is not a language short cut.  In modern English
we don't have a singular neutral declension there, and therefore must
use the plural form in formal language.  In informal language you're
probably talking about a determinate object anyway.

> I am very happy about how our language is changing to allow the titles in
> professions to remove their gendered labels.  We have police officers, fire
> fighters; instead of police men and fire men.  We have the meeting chair, rather
> than chair man.  Many professions weren't labelled as such anyway: engineer,
> baker, cleaner, soldier, doctor, nurse, teacher, physicist, researcher,
> programmer.  Then there are the -ress professions:
> 	actor/actress    =>  actor
> 	waiter/waitress	 =>  serving staff
> etc.  These are being worked around too.

Ah, but "men" means the same as "persons" (or "people" depending on
context), especially when it's a suffix, so those aren't gender labels
as such as perceived as gender labels by some persons.  On the other
hand, it's like coding web sites for standards compliance – at some
point, someone's going to look at it with Internet Explorer 7 and see a
broken site.  Despite the fact that the problem only lies in their
browser being obsolete and stupid, they're going to complain.
Incidentally, so're the next forty thousand people who look at it with
IE7.  You can only win in these situations by dealing with what should
be a statistically irrelevant case.
The –(er)ess denomination was stupid to begin with.  Actor, waiter,
host, governor - none of these are gender-specific terms.  I guess out
of control segregationists just have nothing better to do with their
time.

Cheers,
Francis