> Don't we have more serious problems than discussing various aspects > of political correctness? A zippy buzzword there. Maybe *you'd* like to be referred to with a wrong-gender pronoun? > This is grammatically correct. If there is one subscriber and the gender of > that subscriber is not known, then "he," "she," or "he/she" are all correct > options. It is not *socially accepted* anymore. There is no reason to assume an unseen person is male. > As Miroslaw noted, let's hope that we really do have better things to > discuss than this ... It's an error in the Listserv software. It's germane. > Aren't there complaints about presuming that the poor clueless newby > is female? ...which is also a bad idea. >>> Unfortunately, replacing "his" with "his/her" is a simple, but incomplete >>> solution because it doesn't take reflectors, gateways, or group/role >>> accounts (helpdesk, postmaster, root) into account. > > Er, the only suggestion I can offer here is the only one that I use for > myself personally, when confronted with a gender-specific pronoun used in > an impersonal sense. > > I just don't wrap so much of my self image up in what someone else > impersonally used as a pronoun when writing a manual. And I save my anger > for those who MEANT to insult me. By that logic, no writing other than personal correspondence would ever be subject to change or evolution, because everything else you read wasn't *meant* to insult you. Assuming the reader is male is a dangerous practice. (Or female.) There are rather limited exceptions-- pregnancy, prostate cancer, that sort of thing. > That is generally the case outside north America. I think this > he/she issue is > totally incomprehensible if English is not your native language. Dubious. It can be easily explained. > Most other > languages have thousands of words affected by he/she issues, many don't > even have a neutral gender to begin with, and you just say "he" when you > don't know, or "she" if there is cause to believe that it is probably a she. We are not discussing other languages. > Imagine adding a whole new gender and declensions and everything > to a language just for the case when you don't know a person's gender! Only a > cross between a certified masochist and an utopic-anarchist would > ever propose > that! Oh, stop. Gender in language is more complicated even than that. Try learning a language with masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns (e.g., Russian), or a language with 14 noun classes (e.g., Swahili). English is a piece o' cake on this count. > So when we see Americans spend so much time arguing over the one word > in their language that is not gender neutral, we get thoroughly > confused, especially > since the Brits and Aussies don't seem to do that, at least not to > the same extent. > We just don't think that he vs she is an issue at all in the war > against sexism, They speak the same language. "He" as a universal is just as wrong in Australia, Britain, Canada, the Ivory Coast, or Antarctica. > I was at a big gathering and saw a group of embroiderers, all women, sit > down and start talking. One of them said "Hey, guys", and they all > responded. If that doesn't mean that gender emphasis in language is dying, > then I don't know what does. No, this only proves that people still buy the idea that male=human. What if the group were entirely male and the speaker said "Hey, girls!" Would that show "that gender emphasis in language is dying"? No. You'd be able to hear a pin drop. "Guys" means males. Using it to address heterogeneous groups is a bit rude. It's ridiculous when used to address an all-female group. Look, you can't get around a basic fact: Assuming unseen readers are male is wrong. There are many pleasant gender-neutral alternatives. And BTW, these issues have been extensively tested by linguists and sociologists. It's not hypothetical. -- Joe Clark [log in to unmask] <http://www.interlog.com/~joeclark>