Posted on 05/18/2011 8:24:48 AM PDT by IbJensen
How feminist writer Kate Swift created her own Newspeak Dictionary and helped ruin everyday English.
If you’ve ever felt a twinge of anxiety at hearing someone use “humankind” as a substitute for mankind, or if you’ve winced at the proliferation of the politically correct suffix “person” — as in “chairperson,” or “policeperson” — when the more traditional “man” would be perfectly suitable, chances are you’ve suffered from the corrupting linguistic legacy of feminist writer Kate Swift. Swift, who died last week at 87, was one of a squadron of feminist language police whose crusade to remake language to suit their political agendas has wreaked havoc on everyday English.
Feminists had tried to reform language long before Swift and her fellow word scolds arrived on the scene. In 1949, feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir charged that language was “inherited from a masculine society and contains many male prejudices.” She advised that “women have to steal the instrument” and “use it for their own good.”
Swift and her co-author, Casey Miller, attempted precisely such a heist in their influential 1981 book, The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing. The book had two main premises, both of them dubious. The first was that sexism and sexual discrimination were embedded in the English language. The second was that the language needed to be radically revised in order to change society’s attitudes and make it more inclusive.
Informed more by feminist ideology than linguistic scholarship, the book’s suggested recommendations ranged from the awkward to the downright absurd. For instance, judging the word “mankind” sexist, the authors recommended that it be replaced with “genkind.” Not content simply to ruin existing language, the authors also proposed feminist-friendly neologisms. Thus, “tey,” “ter” and “tem” were to become the sex-neutral surrogates for “he/she,” “his/her” and “him/her.”
Swift and Casey’s more eccentric suggestions failed to catch on, but their book proved a giant leap for genkind, unleashing a wave of feminist assaults on the English language. Picking up where The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing left off, a “feminist dictionary” soon announced in all seriousness that the word “brotherhood” could no longer be used to describe non-fraternal kinship because “it ignores generations of sisters.” Emboldened, feminists insisted that women must now be referred to as “wimmin,” and that history had to become “herstory.”
Had such linguistic absurdities remained confined to the pages of obscure feminist tracts, they would have been a merely an illiterate footnote to the history of modern English. But they became part of the cultural mainstream when the professional arbiters of language embraced the feminist reformation. And so the American Library Association adopted a resolution pledging to avoid supposedly sexist terminology, while the Linguistic Society of America established a Committee on the Status of Women in Linguistics for the same purpose. Universities turned feminist recommendations into campus policies, and the worlds of publishing and journalism followed suit, ruining language use for new generations of speakers and writers.
Not the least of the problems with the feminist theories of language popularized by Swift is that they were based on a fallacy. Contrary to feminist claims, there was nothing sexist about generic nouns like “man,” which had been used for centuries to describe humans collectively. Nor did pronouns like “he” exclude women, a point author E.B. White made in his classic style guide for good writing, the Elements of Style:
The use of he as a pronoun for nouns embracing both genders is a simple, practical convention rooted in the beginnings of the English language. He has lost all suggestion of maleness in these circumstances. The word was unquestionably biased to begin with (the dominant male), but after hundreds of years it has become seemingly indispensable. It has no pejorative connotations; it is never incorrect.
Now it was. History may have been on White’s side, but the culturally ascendant “herstory” was not, and it was feminist pseudo-linguists like Swift who won out in the end. The result was a steady decline in clarity and a surge in the kind of reader-proof, politically correct verbiage that today defines academic jargon — a writing style “somewhere to the left of gibberish,” as an exasperated graduate student once put it.
Feminist theories of language also had spillover effect that contaminated other academic disciplines. Just as language had to be revised to be more gender inclusive, so too did history have to be rewritten to accommodate feminist demands. The result, as Christina Hoff Sommers has documented, was the proliferation of “filler feminism,” in which “non-sexist” texts exaggerated and embellished the role of women in history in order to compensate for their regrettable but real exclusion. So what if women did not play a central role in Native American societies? Feminist historians could claim in the interest of non-sexism that such societies were actually “matriarchal.” Righting historical wrongs was now more important that writing accurate history. Not only did this do a disservice to history but it ill-served students, of both genders, and fueled widespread cultural and historical illiteracy.
Less radical than her feminist followers, Kate Swift always disclaimed being a part of the “word police.” But The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing in many ways served as a model for later attempts to make language an instrument of feminist politics and political correctness. And if she played a part in the transformation of everyday English, three decades on its hard to make the case that it was a change for the better.
What made women “equal” to men in America was the invention of POWER STEERING and AIR CONDITIONING.
Because when the lights go out and STAY out for more than a few days, its the fathers, brothers and husbands that must protect (or rescue) them from the animals.
Also, it is only the acceptence of the Christian model of human dignity that even allows the for the sentiment of “equal treatment”. Christ taught us to love, respect, and care for all. To remove our base elements of lust and hate, and respect the SOUL of each person.
How does Mohammed tell the boys to treat THEIR women?
The western feminists had it better than any women, anywhere on this earth EVER. That this “equality” in rights and lifestyle is primarily the combined result of Christian Thinking and Western Technology, enrages them to no end.
And for some reason, they always seem to align themselves with the enemies of both.
Which, to the cynic in me, almost “proves” their inherent inferiority….by illustrating their inability to distinguish the difference between Threat and Sancuary, Progress and Decay
That, and well, Parallel Parking too.
Bad, not not as bad as using "humanstory" as a substitute for "history."
Remember in the original Star Trek, where Captain Kirk said the mission was “to boldly go where no man has gone before”?
When the next generation of Star Trek came out, Captain Picard said the mission was to go “where no one has gone before”.
There are other examples of this sort of thing. And it’s all due to people kowtowing (sp?) to the PC language police.
You’re just anti-womyn.
The word “chairperson” is awkward.
It seems laughable when the chairperson is a man. Why not just call him the chairman?
Or if it’s a woman, call her the chairwoman.
Well, at least for now, we still have mothers and fathers. But that will probably go out the window, what with homosexual marriage and blurring of gender roles. In our future, there can be no mother or father, only generic “parents”.
Wedding ceremonies routinely pronounce the couple “husband and wife”, rather than “man and wife”, due to this same PC language thing.
I’m surprised the liberals still allow the word “husband”. The word husband originally meant the manager of a household. And it’s still used as a management type of term in “animal husbandry”.
Once the liberals learn that the word husband has impure roots, it will be eliminated.
I teach (try to) English at an adult vocational school up here in Ohio and have fun lampooning such foolishness. I use the example of the word”mankind”:
To be non-sexist,
mankind has to be changed to humankind, but
humankind has “man,” in it, so it has to be changed to hupersonkind, but
since hupersonkind has “son” in it, it has to be changed to hupeoplekind, but
since we’re now offending the animals, we should use hucreaturekind.
Thus, Mankind is now more appropriately Hucreaturekind.
Ping!
I agree substantially with your post; Christian thinking has been the engine of progress between the sexes as well as in technology from the beginning. And I find the language changes awkward and barbaric in most cases.
But as a woman who was in late adolescence when these changes came about, I did experience them differently than the definers of the universal “he” and “his” would like to believe. I was almost 25 before I read an essay and did not assume the writer was a male. This was a watershed revelation.
In business, I many times made use of my could-be-either-gender name to secure interviews that otherwise would have been closed to me. On more than one occasion, I was directly told that from my name, they had expected a male, and did not want to hire a female.
So there was something to be said for using a hammer to kill a fly. This is a most imperfect world.
Marxist ideology destroys the language and history and meaning of cultures to destroy it from within.....Control the language and you control the worldview. It is why they took over the textbooks in the 30’s and 40’s....they understand that you teach children HOW to respond to a word using emotion, never reason— (conform to a one world view—hate white men—the oppressors, the evil capitalists, the evil Christians—destroy that which makes a society self-reliant and self sufficient which includes the patriarchal family who create the most emotionally strong individuals who have strong beliefs).
It is obvious to all...you destroy the concept of father and you destroy the children who will be emotionally damaged without the care and guidance of a loving biological father. The prisons are filled with men and women who lacked a loving father. (No surprise to the Marxists...they understood that you had to destroy family (Lenin destroyed the marriage contract) to break down people and make them malleable and easy to herd.
Marxists strip meaning from culture trying to destroy the concept of Objective Truth. Without Objective Truth, you can not have a civil, just society. Everything is based on arbitrary whims of whoever has the political power. Universal rights and laws will never exist in a world of relativism—those fundamental ideas that created the USA.
He or she that hesitate is lost.
I can’t say what I’m thinking.
PC language came from the Cultural Marxists. It is to destroy Western Civilization by rotting it from within. Their utopia is a really ugly, ugly world of totalitarianism and fear and arbitrary law.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L02B0Cx95g&NR=1
That really should be "hertory."
Mark
Wome who want to be referred to as “wimmin”, I simply refer to as “the future single crazy cat lady.”
The reason is self-evident.
LOL!!
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