Posted on 05/10/2011 8:03:30 AM PDT by reaganaut1
Kate Swift, a writer and editor who in two groundbreaking books — “Words and Women” and “The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing” — brought attention to the sexual discrimination embedded in ordinary English usage, died on Saturday in Middletown, Conn. She was 87.
The cause was stomach cancer, her grandniece Corin R. Swift said.
Ms. Swift turned her attention to the issue of sexist language when she and Casey Miller, her companion, formed a professional editing partnership in 1970 and were asked to copy-edit a sex education manual for junior high school students.
The stated goal of the manual was to encourage mutual respect and equality between boys and girls, but Ms. Swift and Ms. Miller, who died in 1997, concluded that the author’s intent was being undermined by the English language.
"We suddenly realized what was keeping his message — his good message — from getting across, and it hit us like a bombshell,” Ms. Swift said in a 1994 interview for the National Council of Teachers of English. “It was the pronouns! They were overwhelmingly masculine gendered.”
The partners turned in a manuscript with suggestions that sex-identifying singular pronouns be made plural, or that pronouns be avoided altogether, and that word order be changed so girls preceded boys as often as the reverse.
“The publisher accepted some suggestions and not others, as always happens,” Ms. Swift said. “But we had been revolutionized."
Now, they wrote in the preface to their first book, “Words and Women,” “everything we read, heard on the radio and television, or worked on professionally confirmed our new awareness that the way English is used to make the simplest points can either acknowledge women’s full humanity or relegate the female half of the species to secondary status.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Leni
Now THAT is funny.
Back in the early Clinton years, I took a trip to the Smithsonian. Went to the Museum of Natural History as part of the tour. I'll never forget as I'm walking around looking at the exhibits they had one of those 'prohibited' signs
over the word "MANKIND" at some of the exhibits. Underneath the sign were the words "Help stamp out sexism in science".
It was truly a barf alert moment.
Grandyoungerrelative dammit! Grandyoungerrelative!!!!
I typically respond by telling them that I speak the English language; and by asking them what language it is that they think they're speaking ... cuz it ain't English.
I beg to differ.
"Firefighter" refers to one who battles a forest fire.
"Fireman" is a person who serves a municipality and who battles urban fires.
I can speak for German.
The German language has three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter.
As Mark Twain famously pointed out in his essay "The Awful German Language" (part of "A Tramp Abroad"), there are numerous examples of nouns not at all corresponding to their grammatic genders (the word for "turnip," for example, is feminine, while the word for "girl" is neuter).
Many occupational designations end in "-er" (e.g., "der Lehrer" = "the teacher"), and can be simply femininized by adding "-in": "der Lehrer" then becomes "die Lehrerin."
So in most cases, it's possible to feminize words without too much clumsiness.
The problems start when writers insist upon feminizing the PLURAL so that both genders are accounted for: "die LehrerInnen" (= "teacher/Esses") - even though, according to standard rules, the Plural can account for both sexes / mixed groups.
And the situation gets really silly when nouns which are NEUTRAL are forceably feminized, as with the neutral word "Mitglied" ("i.e., "member" - as in "member of a club or organization"), the Plural of which is "Mitglieder." Because the Singular "Mitglied" is pluralized by adding "-er," and "-er" LOOKS like a masculine ending, they twist this into "MitgliederInnen."
As a side note, the (neutral) noun "das Fräulein" ("the young lady" or "Miss" as an honorific / form of address) has become taboo, since it is a diminutive of "Frau," and is hence regarded as condescending. Only my gray temples protect me from contemptuous looks when I address, e.g., waitresses ("servers?"; ""serveresses?") using this now antiquated form of address.
Regards,
In fact, on 9/11, when I heard that “firefighter” were on the scene, I wondered how they got there from Colorado so fast.
Rug munchers.
It figures.
Homosexualism destroys society.
So she was ground zero for the feminazi movement? Good riddance.
No tears here for the lesbo writer.
One word Nazi has inspired many more word Nazis.
Her personual deservers to be tossed down a personhole.
It's a shame she was too stupid to grasp the concept in later life.
My little girl decided her little spray bottle was distinct from her brother's. His is a mister, hers is pink, and therefore, a misses.
hopefully with her passing the PC will start to fade with her.
I'm not sure...maybe it says in her o-bitch-uary ;-).
Didn't even tell us who the ushims were.
Leni
The apple hit Newton on the head because it was the macho thing to do.
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