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Among the Intellectualoids
The War of the Words
The non-sexist dismantler of English has died.
Dammit, it’s not “Everybody has their book”!
It’s “Everybody has his book.” His! His! His! Got that?
Not many do, I confess: for which outcome the blame attaches in no small degree to Kate Swift — may her recently departed soul rest in peace — and her disagreeably influential books on, ahem, non-sexist writing. Swift made the dismantling of English fashionable for purposes of consciousness-raising. May the Lord show her better things at this momentous passage in her career.
The idea behind Words and Women: New Language in New Times and The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing was that men (those brutes) used the English language as one more tool for the depreciation of women’s worth. Look at “his,” considered as the all-purpose singular pronoun. When you wrote it or said it, you were conceding the notion of male centrality.
Well, you weren’t, but people thought this way back in the '70s, when Swift and Casey Miller, her “companion” (hardly an encouraging designation), were pouring forth their sentiments about language reform.
In the preface to Words and Women, the two reformers noted that before they formed their understandings, “everything we read, heard on the radio and television, or worked on professionally confirmed our new awareness that the way English is used to make the simplest points can either acknowledge women’s full humanity or relegate the female half of the species to secondary status.”
That settled it. They were right. Therefore, the language had to change. It was OK — no, it was de rigueur — to pair a singular noun with a plural pronoun. If not that, we were to write, “his or her,” uselessly adding two syllables to the construction. The politics came first; everything else followed.
The big target of course was the word “man.” It got in the way of everything: made you think life revolved around the particular sex (or “gender,” if you preferred) whose pants came with zippers in the front. So it was out with “firemen,” “workmen,” and “chairman.” It was all, hello, firefighters and workers, and “Ms. Chairperson, I move…” The word “son” suffered similar torments.
Tighter feminists even than Swift-Miller touted the healing properties of “wo-myn” or “wo-person.” The latter abortion inspired, among linguistic reactionaries, the satirical locution “wo-perdaughter.” Well, I mean, doesn’t the whole business here concern politics rather than lower concerns, such as grace, dignity, and continuity; not to mention comprehensibility?
Jacques Barzun, among many others, demurred in the face of all this balderdash. In From Dawn to Decadence, his summing up of the past five centuries, Barzun explained: “The Sanskrit root man, manu, denotes nothing but the human being and does so par excellence, since it is cognate with the word for ‘I think.’” “Woman,” he said, is “etymologically the ‘wife-human being.”
“The truth is,” Barzun continued, “that any sex-conscious practice defeats itself by sidetracking the thought from the matter in hand to a social issue — an important one, without question. And on that issue, it is hardly plausible to think that tinkering with words will do anything to enhance respect for women among people who do not feel any, or increase women’s authority and earnings where prejudice is entrenched.”
Sigh. He’s, oh, so right. And, oh, so out of order in all the forums that teem with hard-eyed, crop-haired folk waving feminist handbooks — e.g., The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing. This thing isn’t about communication. It sure isn’t about beauty. It’s about politics — the theology of modern times. Whatever stands in the way of political reconstruction has to be reconstructed.
The churches themselves, custodians of the old theology, concede as much. The hymnals and prayer books of the '70s — the Swift-Miller age — were cunningly redrafted to reflect the New Realities. Sexist words like “king” and “lord” can be hard to extinguish in the face of Christianity’s unanimous teaching. Likewise, the troublesome likes of “he” and “him” abound in Scripture. You can’t always get past such. A person can try, though, can’t she? And so: Psalm 1:1, the Book of Common Prayer (1928): “Happy is the man that hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly….” Psalm 1:1, the Book of Common Prayer (1979): “Happy are they who have not walked in the counsel of the wicked…”
The late Ms. Swift grasped a truth of a certain kind: Language shapes and teaches. Want to propound a new “truth”? Get control of vocabulary and grammar. (Orwell certainly knew as much.) The vocabulary of feminism, as roughed in by The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing, gives the proponents of that viewpoint a leg up (a “limb up,” as the Victorians would have said) in the sexual egalitarianism drama they seem bent on enacting.
OK, everybody today has indeed got their book. But it’s wrong! It’s also gratuitous, awkward, and — forgive me — just plain stupid.
About the Author
William Murchison, a Dallas-based columnist for Creators Syndicate and author of Mortal Follies: Episcopalians and the Crisis of Mainline Christianity (Encounter Books), is completing a biography of John Dickinson..
Letter to the Editor View all comments (32) | Leave a comment
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Dee See| 5.20.11 @ 6:24AM
---No doubt heavily subsidized and 'assisted'
by the usual pushers (Rockerfeller/Carnegie/Ford
Foundations et al) of stealth cultural EUGENICS
and subversion.
"AS Plato himself talked about, cultural
trends are always initiated from the top down
by the 'Big Boys'.
From the set-up Billy Graham, to Tavistock
Institute engineered
rock n roll, to porn and Oprah and punk and rap
--absolutely ALLLLL of it
-----------ALWAYS."
-ALAN WATT
(essential online coverage)
IN FACT the same people who engineered'
and largely carried out
the handover of the entire American economy to
their 'fave' ant colony ---the once proud,
long ago opium, and Maoist destroyed China.
-----And guess what's in our fortune cookies
for the next few decades?
Paul Kotik| 5.20.11 @ 6:55AM
Thank you, thank you. Few things in everyday life enrage me more than this metastasis of the third-person plural pronoun. Facebook has made it official. Email notifications read: " Joe Smith has updated their wall". We must all fight back. Use the masculine form of the third person singular pronouns as the general form, and ask for clarification when others misuse the third-person plural.
When we get our Republic back in 2012, could we see about getting our language back after that?
Vern Crisler | 5.20.11 @ 7:04AM
I believe we should all take every opportunity to stick it to feminists in our writing. Whatever offends the gender feminist is the type of thing that is to be preferred, no matter what he things of it. It should be the new standard for English writing.
Petronius| 5.20.11 @ 9:27AM
At least let one of them start the argument. The response I use is, "liberals Can't Understand Normal Thinking."
Patrick| 5.20.11 @ 11:12PM
The strongest, most dominant woman that I know of finds gender neutral grammar to be insulting and patronizing. "If that's what's holding you back, you have bigger problems than English."
Gran Torino| 5.20.11 @ 7:24AM
I translate from other languages into English, and I can tell you the whole s/he garbage is just that: garbage. I actually had to tell foreign students (when I was still a teacher) that we say: "Oh look, there's someone up there, they're about to fall," even though there is actually only one person. But since we can't tell what sex from down here (and do women jump off high buildings if they don't have to?), we have to be neutral--well, this is Europe: I won't go into the looks on their faces.
Texas Engineer| 5.20.11 @ 8:16AM
"It got in the way of everything: made you think life revolved around the particular sex (or "gender," if you preferred) whose pants came with zippers in the front. "
I've been saying this for years. Nouns have gender. People have sex. Simple isn't it?
John McG| 5.20.11 @ 9:13AM
Thank you so much! I was especially delighted to see Barzun cited for defending standard usage, a cause he undertakes in “Simple & Direct” and “A Word or Two Before You Go…” (and elsewhere). Here’s an excerpt from “A Word or Two” regarding poor, abused [man]. (Italics are not supported on this page, so I’ve used brackets to indicate their use.)
Nor does it ([person]) shine when compounded: a [chairperson] is an awkward entity to address from the floor. The suffix would be ludicrous with [fire] or [post]; it is impossible in [Minute Man, service man, gas man, clergyman]. It will not work in [manhandle] or [man a boat]. And one is at a loss what to do with [woman]. For that [–man] ending is the same there as in the words now being outlawed. Originally, [waef-man] or “wife-man,” [woman] leads us to the truth about [man], a truth that reformers do not know or wish to ignore, namely, that the word has two equal meanings, of which “male” is only one. The other (and earlier) is “human being.” As the English Bible has it: “God created man, male and female.”
…
Being derived from [homo], “human” and “humanity” should therefore be damned and suppressed if [mankind] is forbidden. Yet many patient copy editors cross out this evil word, substitute [humanity], and feel virtuous – not noticing that their [vir]tue is masculine, not to say [virile].
PolishKnight| 5.20.11 @ 9:18AM
One thing that fascinates Europeans and foreigners in general is how so much more rabid the feminists are in the states despite us not having the same female-friendly welfare states as over there.
Only... Finnish (don't know about Swedish) has a language that's as gender neutral as the USA. Coincidence?
In German and Polish, EVERYTHING has a gender. It would drive an American feminist insane (and often does.)
"Die pampers".
We really have achieved the goals of 1984 with Newspeak and The Anti Sex League.
Lesser Weevil| 5.20.11 @ 2:06PM
Among the Indo-European languages, the only one I know that has lost all traces of grammatical gender is Persian (Farsi). No "he" and "she" at all. You can draw your own conclusions.
PCC| 5.20.11 @ 7:30PM
Same in Chinese.
Patrick| 5.20.11 @ 11:21PM
Chinese is not Indo-European.
So what is the difference between dinner and food? Well, in Latin, food is masculine while dinner is feminine. Enough with the whining.
YeloStalyn| 5.20.11 @ 9:45AM
I think it a bit ironic that in attempting to remove "man" from language, the feminist has actually increased the words potency as a male word. Prior to "-person", males had to share their pronouns with people of both sexes (mankind is both man and woman) while women were the sole owners of theirs (woman was never misunderstood to be a man in any instance). It was in the previous (and correct) use of language that women had "more" than men, linguistically. Woman had her own pronouns AND got to have some of man's.... sounds a lot like marraige! Now they have given up the unique position of beign the only of the two genders to have their very own, quite specific, not-to-be-shared with those "ugly" and "horrible" men pronoun.
Dumb persons...
Doctor Right| 5.20.11 @ 10:17AM
Does this mean I can jettison "herstory" (instead of "his"-tory), and "wimmin" (instead of "women"), both drilled into my skull by left-wing ideologues at UMass during the 1980's..?
Occam's Tool| 5.20.11 @ 6:00PM
Dr Right,
Yes, You Can! Hope and Change You Can Believe IN!
Frisbee| 5.20.11 @ 9:42PM
Yes, D.R., please do.
Patrick| 5.20.11 @ 11:22PM
It's wymyn in some dialects of Idiot.
JeffT| 5.20.11 @ 10:56AM
He who controls the language, controls the argument. The Democrats learned this lesson a long time ago. They define the terms. Our side has allowed them to do this time and time again. We are defined by them and the media accomplices who continue the dialogue with those terms. We have to start defining ourselves and making the case for conservatism/libertarianism and not let the other side say who and what we are. Until we do this, we are doomed to lose these public policy arguments with the general, and increasingly ignorant, public.
Flex| 5.20.11 @ 12:37PM
JeffT, you nailed it perfectly.
I have been saying the same for a long time, but it rarely resonates. Controlling the narrative is what allows liberals to dominate...well, that and having the mainstream media and academia in the back pocket. True conservatives and libertarians must go on the offensive regarding language, and stop backing down with tail between the legs when the left tries to dictate. We need to grow a collective pair and attack for once.
Flex
Frisbee| 5.20.11 @ 9:47PM
Yes Jeff, I agree.
One of my favorite statements of the obvious for modern liberals is for example the follwoing:
"The right to marry does not include the right to redefine marriage".
Note though, that in many cases they are not so much "defining" the terms as un-defining them or vaguarizing them into the impossibly unobjectionable (euphemising). A case of the latter would be "abortion" becoming "choice" and then "reproductive freedom". How libertarian of these neo-Nazi eugenecists!
PCC| 5.20.11 @ 11:24AM
What's wrong with making the effort to say "his or her" or saying "In performing the job, s/he will ..."?
Or, if you really think it's no big deal, then use "her" instead of "his", and nobody dies.
Jive Bomber| 5.20.11 @ 11:40AM
pcc: You obviously do not comprehend the article.
On the other hand, you do respond to social brow-beating rather well.
CalMark| 5.20.11 @ 12:08PM
Good article.
In 1990, I was read me the P.C. riot act for using "his" instead of "his or her." Explaining my understanding of standard grammar got me bullied into silence, with strong implications I was a hater and abuser of womyn.
It makes one despair of person-kind.
shipley130| 5.20.11 @ 1:50PM
Not all ideas of wo-myn kind are great. But one of the greatest things ever said (or made popular) was by a woman and now it's coming true. "Socialists eventually run out of other people's money."
JP| 5.20.11 @ 4:03PM
The Feminists unleashed a Pandora's Box. It took the West the better part of 1600 years to elevate women, give them equal rights, voting rights, and other legal and civic privleges not found in any other culture. It took less than 50 years to undo it all. After all, on a purely physical level, women are easy to dominate (just go to Saudi Arabia or Yemen to see for yourself).
For the feminists, at the beginning of thier quest, is was all about sex. They were jealous of men and angry at Nature. Thier war in many ways was a rebellion against Nature. But Nature has the last laugh. Men are naturally pulled towards Freedom (freedom to have sex with whomever and whenever; the freedom from responsibility; and the freedom to dominate). Slowly, but steadily, women are once again being denigrated. The feminists may have won the language and political battles, but in the long run they will lose the war. That's the thing about Pandora Boxes - once the cat is out of the bag it doesn't want to go back in.
uncle curmudgeon| 5.20.11 @ 5:29PM
You are right about Orwell: the first thing the totalitarians destroy is the language. By their word you shall know them (as well).
Occam's Tool| 5.21.11 @ 7:46PM
Yes, Orwell noted that by limiting the ideas that can be expressed in a language, one can limit the thoughts that can be thought. (The Appendix to 1984)
Replica Handbags&wallet; | 5.21.11 @ 1:18AM
Left unmentioned is that Mitt Romney is the father of gay marriage in Massachusetts, as documented in extensive detail in a recent book by Amy Contrada. His decisive role in changing state policy on gay marriage, without regard to the requirements of the state's constitutional requirements, deserves far more attention than it has received to date by conservative commentators.
libertytim| 5.21.11 @ 8:20AM
In light of the article, that would be "homosexual" marriage and not "gay".
Michele San Pietro| 5.21.11 @ 3:10PM
It's definitely plain stupid.
Dee See| 5.22.11 @ 12:55AM
And speaking of the culture subverting
antics of the capstone creeps ---CHECK THIS OUT!
GM's CEO Daniel Ackerson, a Carlisle Group
heavy, is using OUR tax subsidy money to
fund a lavish, feature length film celebrating
the 'marvelous' legacy of Mao Tse Tung,
the CCP and the 'EUGENICS friendly' peacetime
extermination of 86 MILLION.
ALL this after the 30th, 40th, 50th and last
year 60th Anniversaries of the awesomely
significant KOREAN WAR were 'overlooked'
(50,000 Americans killed/5000 still missing)
---and even as the 'EUGENICS and RED China friendly'
Fukishima disaster is being buried by world
media.
REALLY folks ---we are dealing with TRAITORS
and TREASON, full spectrum, pure and simple.
YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS
HUAC meets NUREMBERG 2012
Dale White| 5.22.11 @ 5:23PM
Mr. Murchinson, you sexist oink, I salute you. Well said.