[TheForge] PC-ness Grammatical Pet Peeve Rant - Way OT

[Bruce Freeman]

You guys surely don't deserve this rant, but I gotta
vent somewhere!

(Climbing onto my soapbox, preparing to be pedantic.)

"Gender" is NOT a synonym for "sex."  (And "sex" is a
noun, not a verb, that refers to a biological
attribute, not to coitus.)  I am of the male sex.  I
don't HAVE a gender.  

Pronouns and possessive adjectives have gender.  In
many foreign languages the nouns have genders too. 
But people and animals do not have genders.  

With all the overt sexuality in this society, why did
"gender" ever get plucked out of the dictionary as a
euphamism for the word "sex" that even the Victorians
freely used?  

I suspect it was a seconday error from the "he/she"
fiasco.  "He/she" is not a grammatical construction
and is totally unnecessary.  The proper pronoun is
"he," NOT because we don't respect women, but because
"he" includes women.  Why?  Because "he" is MASCULINE,
not MALE.  

Masculine, in this sense, is a grammatical attribute,
and has nothing to do with sex.  Anglophones may not
appreciate that because "he" and "she" are so closely
associated with the male and female sexes in English. 


That's NOT TRUE in other languages.  "Madchen,"
(literally, "little maid" in German) is NEUTER, but do
a google image search on the word and you'll agree
there's nothing neuter about the photos that come up. 
But neuter is also a grammatical concept.  It has
nothing to do with sex.

Therefore, it's perfectly proper to speak of one of us
as "he," without disrepecting the ladies on theforge. 
Properly, a baby or an animal is "it," not "he" or
"she."  (That may be a stretch for new parents, but
for diners in a restaurant where IT is screaming - -
no stretch at all!)

(Climbing down from my soapbox.)

I don't know what set me off this morning.  One too
many "he/she"'s, one too many forms asking my "gender"
I guess! 

Bruce
NJ 



 
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