One of the things I brought back from Boston (including a lot of ounces around my waist from lobster) is this letter to the Boston Globe, by one Margie Lynch.
Watch your language
IN THE advanced year of 2007, I'm always stunned to hear or read language that isn't gender neutral. And it's all the more stunning when I see it in an article written by a woman in a publication as progressive as the Globe ("Democrats court labor backing," Page A6, Aug. 8).
The worst offender is the word "manning," by which is undoubtedly meant "to supply with people (as for service)" (Merriam-Webster). Yet to the my eye and ear, the word explicitly excludes me along with the majority of the US population. There are many gender-neutral alternatives, such as "staffing." I hope the Globe's editorial staff will be more mindful of using them, and will impress upon its reporters the importance of doing so.
Ms. Lynch's last name is proof, if any be needed, that there is a God and that She/He has a sense of humor.
Two things strike me as obvious from the epistle. First, Ms. Lynch hasn't thought much about the meaning of the words she finds offensive. The word man apparently derives from a very old root, present across a geographically wide range of languages (e.g., German and Sanskrit), that is ambiguous: it means either human being or male human being. The ancient Greek word anthropos involves the same ambiguity. But it has a second derivation, almost as old, from the Latin root for hand, as in the words manual and manipulate. So to man a ship, for example, may mean to supply the boat with a number of Y Chromosomes, or simply with a number of deck hands (chromosome neutral). Trying to eradicate the three letters man from the English language cuts modern language off from its etymological roots, which does serious damage to our self-understanding. And if we take Ms. Lynch's puritanism seriously, we would have to strip the language of all the man = hand words, which would be a loss of a lot of verbal resources.
The second problem is suggested by this language:
Yet to the my eye and ear, the word explicitly excludes me along with the majority of the US population.
The implication here is that anything offensive to Ms. Lynch's "eyes and ears" out to be stricken from the dictionary. That way lies the evisceration of language and reason. The fundamentalists don't want to hear about evolution. The Muslims don't like the word terrorist. Pretty soon a lawyer won't be able to use the word rape on behalf of a woman in a rape trial.
Maybe we should quit trying to purge the language of offensive words and instead focus on the concepts and objects that words try to capture.
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