4 ms·
For one, English seems to suffer from having the same word mean two different things (gender, and an activity), that makes it already harder to parse.
by Aardwolf 6y ago
For one, English seems to suffer from having the same word mean two different things (gender, and an activity), that makes it already harder to parse.
- slowmovintarget 6y agoNo the difficulty, in English, is that gender originally meant one's biological sex. There has been a concerted effort to assert that perceived gender and gender are the same. The confusion is deliberate. From Webster's Dictionary (1828): > 1. Properly, kind; sort. > 2. A sex, male or female. Hence, > 3. In grammar, a difference in words to express distinction of sex; usually a difference of termination in nouns, adjectives and participles, to express the distinction of male and female. But although this was the original design of different terminations, yet in the progress of language, other words having no relation to one sex or the other, came to have genders assigned them by custom. Words expressing males are said to be of the masculine gender; those expressing females, of the feminine gender; and in some languages, words expressing things having no sex, are of the neuter or neither gender Nowadays, the political effort is to tie people in mental knots over how a person feels about their gender, how a person presents themselves, and how a person prefers to be addressed.