Michele Bachmann: People want to see me 'mud-wrestling' with Sarah Palin

Politico ^ | June 29, 2011 | JAMES HOHMANN

[Finny]

My support for Palin has absolutely nothing to do with her appearance or gender sex.

There. Fixed it for you.

You don't mean gender, you mean SEX. It's okay to use the word SEX. Sex. Mighty proud to say it -- shout it to the rooftops -- Palin has a SEX! So does Obama, and so does nearly every other living thing on this planet. Even mules and jennys have a sex, I'm pretty sure; it's just that they can't reproduce!

Gender and sex are NOT interchangeable; they do not mean the same thing. However, recently (as within the last ten years) dictionaries have changed the definition of the word "gender" to keep with the current politically-correct tendency of people using it in place of the word "sex." I believe that it is one of those insidious, subtle perversions of language, like going from "bum" to "homeless person" or "secretary" to "administrative assitant," that is a thing that should make one pause and resist.

The word "gender" refers to a grammatical concept; English speakers have a hard time grasping it because very few words in English have gender, and in the ones that do, that I can think of, any way, that gender happens to correlate with the subject's biological sex. In Spanish, French, German, etc., gender has ZERO correlation with sex. Big fat donut hole. Please, hear me out.

"The doe shook his head."

THAT is an example of GENDER misused. The word "doe" has a feminine gender, which tells you that in the sentence, you refer to the doe as a "she." GENDER of the word "doe" tells you to say "The doe shook her head." I know, the doe has a female sex, but that's because the English language reserves gender for words in which the subject has a biological sex, at least, as far as I can recall.

In Spanish, "La casa es roja," means the house is red. "Casa" has a feminine gender. It does not mean that the house is a female, or is of the female sex. It means that the word has a feminine gender, and THEREFORE you would correctly say, "La casa es roja," not "El casa es rojo." "Vestido" is Spanish for dress, as in a woman's dress. The word has a masculine gender, therefore you know that if the dress is red, you say, "El vestido es rojo" because the gender of the word -- not the sex of the dress, but the GENDER of the word -- instructs you.

I'm on a crusade to try to get conservatives to stop using the word "gender" in place of the word "sex." Like the term "sanitary engineer" instead of the word "janitor," (mis)use of the word "gender" for the real word "sex" is a way of euphemizing and downplaying reality.

Thanks for indulging my rant! :^)

[Finny]

And by the way, THANKS for so eloquently coming to my defense on the George Costanza/Sara Palin argument! Some of my favorite and most respected people regularly misuse the word "gender," and that includes Rush and even Levin!

:^)

[HiTech RedNeck]

With apologies to any cunning linguists, it’s perfectly unambiguous to say “gender” when the entity being described is human and the English language is the medium of discourse. It’s a convention of English, and the writers and speakers of English never felt a great compulsion to indulge picky purists. If you want that kind of language, you might be happier in France, where instead of private dictionary companies documenting popular consensus, they have a government bureau to prescribe the correct usage of terms both old and new.

[Finny]

Try telling that to one -- no, two, of the finest professional copy editors I ever had the pleasure of working with. :^) And as it happens, both of them politically conservative; they were my friends as well as my copy editors ... and because they were GOOD copy editors, they took my copy and made it better. They made me look good.

AS OPPOSED to a lousy (and as it happens, politcally liberal) copy editor who once "corrected" the word "memento" to "momento" in the lead (or, for those purists you so roundly chastize, "lede," an archaic term that journalist snobs often use) of a feature story I wrote for that paper. THAT copy editor made me look bad (and also made his paper look bad).

Words have meaning. Yes, language is dynamic and I have to accept it. Dynamic language, especially in English, often results in better and more efficient communication, such as the practice of "verbing" words (for example, the word "dialogue," which used to be a noun but is now also a verb, as in "Let's dialogue."

But use of the word "gender" neither makes the language more efficient (in fact, it's the other way around, replacing a one-syllable, three-letter word with a two-syllable, six-letter word is NOT an increase in efficiency) nor does it make it more precise. In truth, (mis)use of the word "gender" is a sly way of neutering thee and me.

[HiTech RedNeck]

If gender and sex differ with respect to humans, it is that gender is more a social concept, and sex a biological one. In sane human societies, gender follows sex, and bending it otherwise is viewed as weird and wrong. To refer (English assumed) to, say, a tom cat as a cat of the “masculine gender” would make no sense at all — because cats do not have societies in which social constructs can exist, Looney Toons cartoons notwithstanding. By the way if counted by the number of organisms, most on earth don’t have a sex. Think bacteria.

[upsdriver]

Thanks for the long, detailed correction. :p No wonder I got it wrong having listened to Rush for over 20 years.

And... you’re welcome.

[Chunga]

The entire Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann infatuation is nothing more than the juvenile ogling of married women.

You're a moron.