Grammar Gripe

[imogen]

It's in the forum software and it bugs me. When you send a PM, it says "Thank you for sending a message to Friend's Name. They will be notified when they receive it."

I know that we use they because we don't want to be bigots and use he, but they is plural. I only have one friend!

What, we have PM on this forum?






I've never got one.    

[Porter]

Did you ever send one?

[Jonathon]

The only thing keeping "he" from being gender-neutral in such contexts is that people refuse to let it be gender neutral.

I disagree. So does Ken Jennings, so I must be right.

[Annie Subjunctive]

On also means I and we ad they. It's like the all purpose pronoun.

[Porter]

I’m not the militant gender-bias-avoider that Grumpy Man probably thinks I am, but I’m aware of the problem. I think it was a Douglas Hofstadter essay that first pointed me toward the disturbing findings of a 1972 experiment at Duke, in which groups of students were given two versions of a textbook, one with gender-neutral phrasings and one without. The students of both genders who read the gender-biased version were markedly more likely to picture the subjects of the text as male. In other words, the generic masculine is not generic. It makes readers think the generic sentence object has a penis, to the tune of about a 30-40% margin.

Huh.  I had never heard of that.  That's pretty convincing.

[beverly]

I can vouch for this going on in my brain.  "He" will never feel gender neutral to me.  Whenever something tries to be gender neutral, my brain automatically generates "male."  Female must be specified.  I imagine this is largely a product of the influences I was raised with, society and culture and alll that.  Basically, I am incapable at my core of being unbiased about gender.  I try to overcome that bias with my conscious mind, but the tendancy will probably always be there.

[Porter]

I wonder if the same thing (referring to the study) is true for native speakers of languages like Spanish, where generic masculine is explicitly part of the language.

I know that "he" is far more gender-neutral to me since I spent a couple of years speaking Portuguese.

But then, not everybody in the study reacted to "he" that way.  Maybe I'm in the other group.

[beverly]

Filipino languages are truly gender-neutral.  I loved it!  It was very liberating.  They do not have separate words for "brother" and "sister," "husband" and "wife," "daughter" and "son."  We sound awkward when we say "sibling," though less so when we say "spouse."  But in Tagalog you actually have to specify "female sibling."  There is no "gender baggage" in the language and I actually think it does have an effect on the mindset of the people who speak the language.  

I noticed also that there was a very high percentage of what one might call "gender confusion" there.  While there were less expectations of what "male" and "female" ought to be, there also seemed to be a much higher percentage of people who favored being more like the opposite sex than what we typically think of as being their own.  Seemed to be a higher percentage of bi-sexual and homosexual attraction as well.  (I often joke that while there, I had more women fall in love with me than men.)

I am a believer that our language structure does influence the way we think and view the world.  I think that the way the Spanish language is set up probably adds ot the tendancy of "machismo" that we find in those cultures.  Not just pronouns have gender, everything has gender (not unique to Spanish) and if one male is present, it is sufficient to change the nature of a group.  Add a female to a group, nothing happens.  (Dunno if that is unique to Spanish.)   Feel free to correct me on this.

[Porter]

Portuguese works the same, and I'm pretty sure that French does as well.

[Annie Subjunctive]

Piaget thought so too. I don't know if I agree.

[Jonathon]

Huh.  I had never heard of that.  That's pretty convincing.

Yeah, it is. And in my experience, it's only men who say, "But he IS a gender-neutral pronoun if you just think of it that way!" I don't think I've ever heard a woman say that.

[Jonathon]

Beverly, my gut feeling is that it's more a result of the culture than the language. Americans seem to think that British men in general are sissies, but there aren't any grammaticalized gender differences between British and American English. It also seems to me that European are less homophobic and more fashion-savvy than American men. I'm mostly going off of stereotypes there, but it seems to hold true from the few European men I've known.

[Icarus]

Yeah, that's based off the stereotype of the aristocratic Englishman. The English immigrants we get here are more the working-class type (think soccer hooligans), and it would not occur to them to think of them as sissies. On the contrary, they tend to accuse Americans of being sissies. For one thing, they think we don't beat our children nearly enough.

[rav]

"Thank you for sending a message to Friend's Name. The recipient(s) will be notified."

Is my solution.

[Porter]

My solution involves suing somebody.

I'm not sure who I'm going to sue, but I'll work it out.

[Jonathon]

I'd sue Invision Power Services. They're the ones who made the board software, after all.

[Porter]

Yeah, but they don't have Creepy Eyes.

That's emotional distress, right there.

[Annie Subjunctive]

And in my experience, it's only men who say, "But he IS a gender-neutral pronoun if you just think of it that way!"

I say that.

[Porter]

:fear:

[Jonathon]

And in my experience, it's only men who say, "But he IS a gender-neutral pronoun if you just think of it that way!"

I say that.

I guess there's an exception to every rule.

[Tante Shvester]

Yeah, but they don't have Creepy Eyes.

:fear:

Sez who?

[rivka]

While you were away, Annie, he even convinced me .

And I'm so darn proud.

Yes, I know.

And what the heck was going on with the extra space after "me"? How odd.

[AFR]

Here's another way to avoid the pronoun issue in that statement, brought to you by the always helpful 19th century: Thank you for submitting a message to Friend's Name. Said Friend's Name will be notified.

It's like a half-pronoun! Genius!

[Tante Shvester]

Here's another way to avoid the pronoun issue in that statement, brought to you by the always helpful 19th century: Thank you for submitting a message to Friend's Name. Said Friend's Name will be notified.

It's like a half-pronoun! Genius!

It's anti-pronoun.

Maybe it's proverb.

[AFR]

Wouldn't an anti-pronoun be a connoun?

Quick poll: Are you for or against nouns?