Re: "Man-months" offend some of your audience.

["Nancy E. Kaminski" <nancykam -at- MEDIAONE -dot- NET>]

Arthur Dilancea wrote:

>All this talk about gender and political correctness has become, for lack
>of a better qualifier, disfunctional.
>The political correctness movement is like unions: they may have been a
>good thing when they first started, but now, they're nothing but a pain...


I do agree that the PC effort to erase gender in all cases from all writing
can go to extremes. I also find it interesting that the posters who are
wondering "what's the big deal?" about using male pronouns generically are
predominantly male. <g> Draw your own conclusion from that one.

That aside, the way we attempt to get around the problem at my company is to
make as many refererences as possible plural, for instance, "Managers must
submit their employees' timesheets on Thursday afternoons before 3 p.m."
instead of "The manager must submit his (or the clumsy and tiresome "his or
her") employees' timesheets... ."  This allows us to neatly sidestep the
whole issue and not violate grammar rules.

Fortunately we don't have titles here like "chairman" to cope with, but I
tend to think we would go with the neutral form "chair." There are a lot of
women in the healthcare industry, and I certainly wouldn't want to exclude
them -- especially since they are in control of my paycheck. <g>

My .02, of course!

==============================================
Nancy E. Kaminski , Technical Writer/Editor
Fairview Health Services, Minneapolis, MN USA
(612) 672-6882 phone, (612) 672-6083 fax
nkamins1 -at- fairview -dot- org | nancykam -at- mediaone -dot- net
==============================================


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