The politically correct language police have got us so confused about sex and gender that we don't understand our own language anymore. Ships aren't female to

The politically correct language police have got us so confused about sex and gender that we don't understand our own language anymore. Ships aren't female to English speakers. Rather, they're tagged with the feminine gender. Linguistic gender is separate from sex; it just happens that in English, although gender is almost completely dead in the language we still happen to tag females as "feminine gender" and males as "masculine gender". The reason for the associations are more or less random. They vary from language to language, and don't seem to have much to do with whether you'd think of something as "manly" or "related to pursuits of the fairer sex". In French and Spanish, the gender assignments of some random words: pencil m m truck m m house f f building m m store m f fortress f f navy f f military f f castle m m shoe f m boot f f hat m m So in both French and Spanish, fortress, navy, and military are all feminine, while pencil or hat are masculine? While other words like store and shoe change their gender from language to language. There's really just two coincidences together that cause all this confusion: 1) For what little gender English has, it happens that there are two genders. That's not true for other languages. Lots of languages have many genders. 2) Many other languages have gender but don't even concern themselves with "masculine" or "feminine". According to wikipedia, The Bantu language Ganda has "10 classes called simply Class I to Class X and containing all sorts of arbitrary groupings but often characterised as people, long objects, animals, miscellaneous objects, large objects and liquids, small objects, languages, pejoratives, infinitives, mass nouns". No confusion about females being feminine here, and so forth.