JediOre wrote:It was not until the rise of modern Feminism in the education system back in the '70s and '80s that the concept of "man" and male pronouns was bullied into the category of discriminatory.
You just don't get it. Context is
not always clear. My sociolinguistics class had this gawd awful textbook that switched randomly and clunkily between the neuter male and the neuter female. But it did make the point that neuter female could be just as effective as neuter male, and neuter male could work perfectly fine if the writer was
good enough to make the context clear. The male neuter does NOT carry any magic abilty on its own to convey context. That's
all up to the writer. 1970s is not the first time Male Neuter has come up, although it might be the first time females got to weigh in on the matter; several centuries ago weren't there some male Latin-loving eggheads that decided that English needed a Latinesque "rule" about male pronouns being neuter? Meh, I think the Latin love affair blinded a lot of scholars to what English actually was, a Germanic language with rich Romance borrowings that continued to change and grow with it's environment.
Feminist bullies? Yeah, too bad women like to know when they are included.
Consciously forcing a language to change probably won't work well (yeah, I know, tell that to Webster
), but trying to force a language to
not change is equally problematic. English has always been highly adaptable. I can think of several evolutions in my lifetime-- such as using the word "gender" when "sex" is meant (which kinda drives me up a wall, but I don't seek to find catagories of people to blame for bullying the poor language into it, the horror!). English will continue to adapt when it needs to, and sometimes when it doesn't. Personally I find it one of the wonderful things about the English language. I don't understand getting bent out of shape over the possibility that language might evolve.
So, what does feminist bashing and the use of male pronouns have to do with DCC? Anything?