On Friday, 12 June 2015 at 09:26:29 UTC, Alix Pexton wrote:
On 11/06/2015 2:30 AM, weaselcat wrote:
On Thursday, 11 June 2015 at 00:57:34 UTC, Tofu Ninja wrote:
On Wednesday, 10 June 2015 at 20:14:10 UTC, Nick Sabalausky
wrote:
Contrary to technical official definition, in REAL WORLD
usage, "he"
is BOTH a masuline AND a gender-neutral pronoun. A few
occasional
nutbags who deliberately ignore the "gender-neutral"
possibility in
order to promote their "you are all sexists" agenda is NO
excuse for
bowing to thier pressure.
Personally I don't perceive he as ever being gender
neutral(us native
speaker). If I am trying to be gender neutral then I will use
"they"
or "that person" or "one". If some one did try to use he in a
gender
neutral context then I think it would sound weird to me.
'he' has been a gender neutral pronoun for centuries, and as
far as I'm
aware this has its roots in latin using 'man'(vir?) as a
gender neutral
pronoun.
As far as I know, "he" was not historically gender neutral, but
"man" used to be. In Old English, "man" was simply the suffix
that meant "person" ("person" being a newer loan word), hence
words like "chairman" and "foreman" are gender neutral (The
rise of "chairperson" is feminism gone mad (or ignorant) -- she
said). The Old English word for man was weiman (or werman),
literally a male-person and was probably dropped as in some
dialects it would likely be pronounced to similarly to "woman".
A...
"man" is still used as a gender neutral pronoun in German,
however, for some reason it's frowned upon these days, just like
"one" in English. It's considered "arrogant" and old fashioned,
but it's effin useful and solves a lot of problems.
Mind you, decisions made by those who compile dictionaries and
"standards" are not at all based on the reality of a given
language. Double negation exists in English (and many other
languages), but it's stigmati(s|z)ed as being "incorrect". The
vote was 5 to 4 when this decision was made in England. The
official reasoning behind it was that minus + minus = plus, i.e.
"I don't have no money" would mean "I do have money", which is
complete horsesh*t. Of course it means "I don't have money". The
real reason, of course, was class snobbery and elitism: double
negation was and still is commonly used in working class English
in England (and the US, I think). Ironically enough, double
negation is obligatory in standard French, while it is not used
in colloquial French. This shows you how arbitrary these
standards are. Don't take them too seriously, and don't start
religious wars about some eggheads' decisions ;)
The same goes for "ain't". There's no reason why "ain't" should
be "bad English". "I ain't got no money" is perfectly fine,
although it might make the odd Oxbridge fellow cringe and spill
his tea. But what the Dickens, old chap!
