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Subject:RE: Pronouns with User From:"Lakritz, Andrew M." <Andrew -dot- Lakritz -at- Ruesch -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 13 Jul 2001 11:33:56 -0400
The "Usage Note" under he(1) in the American Heritage Dictionary of the
English Language (Third Edition, 1992, 1996) is very useful in sorting out
the issues of using the masculine pronoun when the context is generic or
non-gender specific. The note discusses both the political and linguistic
ramifications of such usage. An average of 37 percent of the usage panel the
Dictionary staff consulted consistently completed sentences with a masculine
pronoun, which suggests that a good many experts in the field (as late - or
early - as the 1980s) believe that there are strong reasons for not using
the form in generic contexts.
Is it possible that a word (he, she, it) can be discriminatory without there
being a context surrounding the word? I can think of some words that may be
discriminatory in and of themselves, but for words like prounouns it
probably doesn't make sense to speak of them, in any case, without the
context. If the pronoun 'he' in a sentence refers to a man, then use it; if
it's meant to refer to people in general, I agree with earlier comments that
suggest we avoid that usage: it's both discriminatory and linguistically
suspect.
The dictionary I consulted has this to say: it is grammatically
unexceptionable for 37 percent of the usage panel to use the pronoun he in
contexts where the prounoun is meant to refer generically to both genders,
"but the writer who follows it must be prepared to incur the displeasure of
readers who regard this pattern as a mark of insensitivity or gender
discrimination. When a majority of writers are taking care to avoid the
masculine as generic, the writer who uses it in this way may invite the
inference that there is some pointed reason for referring to the
representative instance as male." (page 831)
Andrew Lakritz
Senior Technical Writer
Ruesch International
700 Eleventh Street, NW, Suite 400
Washington, DC 20001-4507
202-312-6279
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