Re: Grammar

[David Rogers <davidandrewrogers@gmail.com>]

* John Haltiwanger <john.haltiwanger@gmail.com> [2010-07-27 13:06]:

>'Political correctness' can be onerous, and often contradictory to my
>anti-authoritarian nature, but in the end it is not "the Man" who
>issues requests for language changes so much as the marginalized
>groups that take issue with existing phrasing. Afroamericans, for
>instance, was deprecated sometime around that year 1984.. It all boils
>down to whether you care about what the people concerned are saying,
>which is why I note the author's position when I encounter it. (Rather
>than throwing their paper away, ala Khaled).
>
>This is always a contentious issue when software/coder types are
>involved, one of the serious reasons why female participation in IT
>(in general) and FLoSS (in particular) are so low: many men in these
>circles will not, or can not, give room to critical complaints. The
>problem always originates in the person complaining---they need to be
>less serious, no one around here cares so stfu, etc. This is a serious
>issue, and this is probably one of the least contentious starting
>points for encountering it. That theory would be thrown away because
>it attempts to consciously address real gender inequalities is a
>depressing thought.
>
>I for one have always thought it would be interesting to develop a
>Unicode character that provides a symbol representing a neutral gender
>pronoun. Then, anyone reading can insert he/she or another option to
>their own taste.

That's an interesting idea, and in a way gets neatly around some of the
clumsiness of he/she and other constructions.

One of the difficulties with ALL the alternative ways of writing
pronouns, including new proposals, is that the mere use of any of them
places the writer into a sort of self-constructed ghetto. There is no
way around that that I can see, other than the hope that all other
writers adopt the same alternative way and turn it into the standard.

In the mean time, alternative constructions will continue to call
attention to the writer's personal and political views, for both good
and ill; as long as the writer's audience includes people who remember
standard English, any new pronouns (or old ones used in different ways)
become not just pronouns but part of the writer's message.

In academic writing especially, it's necessary to weigh the effect of
this distraction before using anything other than standard
constructions. Sometimes this kind of focus on the writer's personality
and politics may be welcome, or even necessary; but in some situations
it is not.

-- 
Thanks
David
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