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Re: Rewrite manual intro to be gender-neutral.


From: Charles Wilson
Subject: Re: Rewrite manual intro to be gender-neutral.
Date: Sun, 06 Jun 2010 12:49:13 -0400
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.23) Gecko/20090812 Thunderbird/2.0.0.23 Mnenhy/0.7.6.666

On 6/6/2010 11:15 AM, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> Regardless of Gary's affirmation, I don't think that replacing 'he' with
> 'you' is suitable.  'He' and 'you' are not at all equivalent terms.  If
> there are two people in a room and one of them is 'you' then the other
> one may be 'he' or 'she' but is definitely not 'you'. If one is talking
> about the past, then the gentle reader might still have been in
> elementary school at the time (or the womb) and so it is not suitable to
> use the term 'you'.

Welcome to the wonderful world of political correctness.  I was taught,
and English grammars still concur, that in English -- even that version
spoken on the western side of the pond -- the neuter gender is
represented by the masculine.  But that's not acceptable to the arbiters
of PC, so we're left with circumlocutions like using "one" as a pronoun
(which forces one to use the passive tense), he/she, his/hers, him/her,
and new spellings like "womyn" and "herstory" ... or inappropriate and
excessive use of the second person instead of the third.

Gah.

--
Chuck



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