Re: evolving language (hideous grammar)

["Janet K. Christian" <janetc -at- AUSTIN -dot- APPLE -dot- COM>]

>RoMay Sitze wrote:

>While I don't have the strong feelings many people today seem to have
>about the use of a gender neutral pronoun to replace the use of "he or
>she" in our writing (I'm perfectly happy to use whatever the house style
>demands, but am aware that many are, like Janet, offended by the generic
>"he"), I am fascinated by the way our language evolves over time. An
>interesting tidbit that recently came to my attention was brought to mind
>by this discussion: the term "girl" was originally a generic term for
>both male and female children. How times have changed!

>        RoMay Sitze,  rositze -at- nmsu -dot- edu

I still believe we (as writers) have the power to influence a change for
the better. To those on this list who've found "she" distracting, and even
offensive, that is exactly how I feel when I encounter "he" in writing. My
eyes immediately "stumble" and I have to reread the sentence. Use of "he"
in documentation has been verboten in all of the companies I've worked for
since 1986. Partly because of this, I can simply no longer read anything
using "he" and view it as generic.

The following is straight out of the "American Heritage College Dictionary
- Third Edition" Copyright 1993.

Traditionally, English speakers have used the pronouns "he", "him", and
"his" generically in contexts in which the grammatical form of the
antecedent requires a singular pronoun, as in "Every member of Congress is
answerable to his constitutents." Beginning early in the 20th century,
however, the traditional usage has come under increasing criticism for
reflecting and perpetuating gender discrimination. There is something
plainly disconcerting, for example, about sentences such as, "Each of the
stars of 'It Happened One Night' (i.e., Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert)
won an Academy Award for his performance." In this case, the use of "his"
forces the reader to envision a single male who stands as the
representative member of this group. Thus "he" is not really a
gender-neutral pronoun; rather, it refers to a male who is to be taken as
the representative member of the group referred to by its antecendent.

Many writers sidestep the problem by avoiding the relevant constructions.
In place of "Every student handed in his assignment," they write "All
students handed in their assignments." Even when using the relevant
constructions, however, many writers never use masculine pronouns as
generics. In a series of sample sentences such as "A patient who doesn't
accurately report __________ sexual history to the doctor runs the risk of
misdiagnosis," an average of 46 percent of the Usage Panel chose a
coordinate form (her/his, his or her, and so on), 3 percent chose the
plural pronoun (although the actual frequency of the plural in writing is
far higher than this number would suggest), 2 percent chose the feminine
pronoun,  another 2 percent chose an indefinite or a definite article, and
7 percent gave no response or felt that no pronoun was needed to complete
the sentence.

As a substitute for coordinate forms such as his/her or her and his, third
personal plural forms, such as their, may be the only sensible choice in
informal style. But in formal style this option is risky for an individual
writer, who may be misconstrued as being careless or ignorant. What is
more, this solution ignores a persistent intuition that expressions such as
"everyone" and "each student" should in fact be treated as grammatically
singular. Writers who are concerned about avoiding both grammatical and
social problems are best advised to use coodinate forms such as "his or
her".

Many writers continue to use the masculine pronoun as generic in all cases.
For the same series of sample sentences the average percentage of Usage
Panel members who consistently completed the sentences with "his" was 37.
This course is grammatically unexceptionable, 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. The entire
question is unlikely to be resolved in the near future.