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> Physicists and physics students are referred to as 'he' not out of sexist motivation, but is a reflection of the plain fact that at that period of history alm
by JadeNB 9y ago
> Physicists and physics students are referred to as 'he' not out of sexist motivation, but is a reflection of the plain fact that at that period of history almost all physicists and physics majors were male.
If all the students in my class but one are male, and I say "if any student in my class wants to pass, then he should come to office hours", then it seems to me that I am being sexist. In fact, I'd go so far as to guess that sexist language about a group is more, not less, harmful when there are fewer women in the group.
I don't think sexism in '50's-era work means that it should be shunned or ignored, but this kind of apologia seems both unnecessary and unjustified. (Why not just "I have not edited the pronouns in the original"?)
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- Jach 9y agoBesides, isn't the more likely reason it was used simply because 'he' is the traditional gender-uncertain pronoun of choice for English? Perhaps someone who was an adult in 1996 could enlighten me whether the pronoun battles and use of 'they' instead of 'he' or 's/he' or 'he or she' were even half as heated as today.
- sverige 9y ago"He" (and "men" rather than "people" or "humanity" or other substitutes) was the "neutral" or "collective" or "universal" pronoun of the English language until very recently. My recollection is that the academic debate began sometime in the 70s during the rise of feminism (when I was a teenager) and the popular debate began sometime during the 80s. I suspect that it was not common to suggest substituting pronouns for extant writings until the 90s or maybe 00s. For a time, some used "he or she" (perhaps some still do) to avoid offending activists, and others tried the use of "one," though most attempts were awkward. Incidentally, "gender" referred to words, and "sex" referred to people and animals. In other words, forms used to collect personal information always requested "sex" (M or F), never "gender." I don't recall when that change occurred, but probably sometime in the 90s. I'm not trying to incite anyone, just observing that using "gender" to refer to living beings and substituting "he or she" or "she" or "one" or other constructions for the "universal he / men" are very recent phenomena, forty years or less.
- JadeNB 9y ago> "He" (and "men" rather than "people" or "humanity" or other substitutes) was the "neutral" or "collective" or "universal" pronoun of the English language until very recently. For what it's worth, and without meaning to argue with the claim about common useage, E. Nesbit, who wrote (at least) in the very early 20th century (a quick Google shows me her "5 children and It" was published in 1902), already used the jarring-to-me but eminently logical 'it' as a gender-neutral pronoun.
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- feborges 9y agoThe fact that many "battles" weren't as heated as today sounds like you are implying that they aren't as important or worth fighting. At some point the "battle" for slavery abolition wasn't very heated either. p.s.: I'm NOT, in any way, putting both causes at the same level but they both sound legit to me.
- Jach 9y agoI agree that's not a good implication to make. The question was about understanding why the editorial comment would be made at all at the time, what the motivation for it was, and why the supposed reasoning for using the pronoun was the user being in a particular environment and time instead of the simpler explanation of pronoun tradition. A plausible candidate would be the ideological battles for the correct usage of pronouns that I've seen in my own adulthood, which isn't to say all ideological issues are bad for being ideological.
- Jun8 9y agoThe interesting thing is that in languages with more explicit gender marking than English, and with no less claim to feminism than the US, this does not seem to be an issue. For example, in French, to use your example, if there were 50 female students and one male student in the class you would still refer to them using the male plural pronoun (http://www.cafebabel.co.uk/society/article/sexist-grammar-the-french-and-german-cases.html http://www.cafebabel.co.uk/society/article/sexist-grammar-th...).
- firethief 9y agoI wonder if that's connected to gender-marking languages like French randomly gendering most nouns? It seems like that could weaken the significance of a words' grammatical gender...
- emmelaich 9y agoYeah, I asked my French teacher whether you could say "s'elle vous plait" instead of "s'il vous plait". She laughed, probably because of the shear novelty of such a thought. It would never occur to a native speaker.
- sulam 9y agoI don't speak French, and am curious about this example. If you have 50 women in a room, do you use the female plural pronoun? In other words, are you saying that all it takes is one man in the room to make it male plural? Honestly (and I'm no gender theorist) this seems fairly sexist too. It's essentially saying psychologically that the man in the room takes precedence over any number of women.
- feborges 9y agoYes, in Portuguese (my native language) it is the same. For instance, "amigos" means "friends" with at least one male (the example of 50 women in a room and 1 man). "amigas" would be "friends" with only women/females. There is in Brazilian Portuguese (probably in other pt speaking countries as well) a movement of people pushing for the usage of letter-tokens to turn gender-specific words into gender-neutral. In this case, they would use "amigxs" or "amig@s".