Anna at Dakota Women responds to my post on this topic. It occurs to me that while Anna and I have the opposite political instincts, we tend to move toward a common position once we have thought about it. Anna says this:
I think that the language puritans are kind of a minority among feminists. I, at any rate, am not one.
I don't know whether Anna is right about the proportion of language puritans among feminists, but language puritanism in academia and publishing is pervasive. Anyone who frequently submits work for editing will have felt its influence. And that influence is generally bad for language.
Why is it shocking and awful and the way to "evisceration of language and reason" to say "mail carrier" or "fire fighter" or "police officer"? Maybe I'm missing the point, here...it's happened before with me and my pal Ken.
My comment about the "evisceration of language and reason" referred solely to the idea that someone's personal sense of being offended was good reason to purge the language of certain terms. Anna didn't so much miss the point as confuse one point with another.
The most basic functions of language are communication and persuasion. A set of words that gets a point across and convinces a reader or an audience is well composed. The higher function of language is eloquence: using words as a painter uses color and texture. Eloquent language not only communicates and persuades, it fashions new architecture in the souls of those who appreciate it. Consider the following example:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
I humbly submit that it is impossible to appreciate the grandeur of that sentence without carving out a new space in one's own soul. Now it might be possible to replace the chauvinist "fathers" with some gender neutral equivalent. But at that point the perfect becomes the enemy of the good.
With regard to ordinary speech, Anna's examples are very good. "Mail carrier" reflects the obvious truth that the person who drops the letters into the letterbox might as well be a man or a woman or transgendered. It is nonetheless more awkward and washed out than the traditional "mailman." By contrast, "firefighter" has more punch and information than "fireman". I just think that rhetorical strategies ought to trump the socially conscious manipulation of language.
And besides: how many firewomen are there, really? It is a corruption of reason to believe that we can manipulate reality by manipulating language.
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