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.
