Shameless abdication
You’d think they have more important things to worry about.
What does that have to do with women? What does it have to do with women’s needs, women’s rights, women’s equality?
Nothing. Not one thing. It’s a pseudo-concern from a pseudo-rights movement that is hell bent on taking rights away from women as opposed to supporting or strengthening or expanding them.
They’ll need to add a hyphen: UN-Women.
How granular can we be with our pronoun choices? I would not like to have an object pronoun, I do not want to be objectified.
At least they preface it with “if you’re not sure.” Sometimes I see it argued that one should always ask, which I guarantee you is not going to catch on outside niche circles.
Niche Circles should be the name of something.
Oh I’m runnin’ in niche circles, niche circles
Tell me baby doncha love my niche circles, niche circles
Have you ever seen the niche circles, niche circles
Asking is offensive. I think I’ll just make an educated guess on a case by case basis. Not being sure about such things doesn’t bother me anymore. Let me apologize in advance for any wailing, weeping, or gnashing of teeth this may cause. :)
@4 Dizzying. :D
What bugs me the most about this is that pronouns exist to make language easier, both for the speaker and the listener. We’re not supposed to pay much attention to pronouns; they’re supposed to be known information in the context of the interaction, and to allow us to focus on new information. Putting so much emphasis on pronouns defeats their purpose, especially in the case of made-up pronouns like “ze/hir/hirs”.
I’ll admit I’m partial to the Indefinite Pronouns: another, each, everything, nobody, either, and someone. Very nice. So if I’m asked, I’ll mention those.
Nobody ever asks for preferred Participial Adjectives. It would be interesting, exciting, and gratifying if they did.
And how about gerunds, eh? Gerunds are fabulous, but nobody ever talks about them either.
Pronous, Pronouns. Pronouns.
Won’t somebody think of the amnouns?
If you’re not sure about what? Whether the person in front of you is male or female? I must admit that I don’t recall ever being in doubt on that score. Even so, if the person you are speaking with has certain preferred pronouns, what are you supposed to do with that information? It’s not as if you would refer to that person by those pronouns during the conversation*, so what’s the point? Are you supposed to suddenly see that person as different, special, unique? If it’s a man and he declares female pronouns or vice versa, are you meant to adopt a different style of speech to suit the gender feelz?
Honestly, it sounds like self-indulgent claptrap to me but what do I know? I’m just one of those boring old men (he, him) with a first-issue birth certificate that has me down as born ‘male’.
* although if the person was a ‘they, them’ type, I would have to try really hard not to refer to them by name, but in the plural. Because I’m just that kind of person I once had a teacher yell at me “You will call me Sir and only Sir! Is that clear?” My reply of “Yes, Sir and only Sir” earned me several detentions.
Haha now I can’t wait for someone to ask me about pronouns. “Oh but daaaahling, pronouns are so passè, I’m all about adjectives this season!”
We don’t hear much about trans people in France, and I had been naively thinking that the revolution would spare us, but I was wrong.
In Marianne this week I read that 700 people in Paris ranging in age from 3 (!) to 18 feel that they have been assigned the wrong sex (or gender if you prefer, though that doesn’t make sense in French), and are trying to switch (or, in the case of the 3 year olds, their parents are trying). French law prohibits genital surgery on minors (not counting male circumcision, I suppose), but all the rest — hormones, drugs etc. — are practised. At one point the article mentions a young trans woman in Canada (more advanced in these matters than France, we’re told) who bitterly regrets transitioning: why couldn’t they let me just be a gay man?
The cancel culture hasn’t reached us yet (not over the trans issue, anyway), but I expect it will.
I was going to omit the parenthesis when I remembered two instances in the past 30 years.
Right at the beginning of the first Gulf War an expert on Islamic culture was due to give a talk on our campus (the timing being completely fortuitous — he had been invited long before anyone knew that the invasion of Kuwait was imminent). Anyway, the administrator of the campus (not a scientist) decided that the invitation should be cancelled, and it was. Many of us were very shocked at the cancellation and we went to a meeting to discuss it. My wife and I were then very angry at how the meeting went: instead of discussing the affront to academic freedom everyone else wanted to draft a letter to George Bush, as if receiving a letter from some people in Marseilles that he didn’t know was going to make him end the war immediately.
The second instance occurred at the turn of the century. I learned that Peter Duesberg (a friend of mine — don’t be too shocked) was in France and I invited him to give a lecture in the Institute (about cancer, not about AIDS/HIV). On seeing the list of invited speakers a colleague asked me if it was I who invited that crazy guy. Yes, I said, but he’s not crazy. Afterwards he had the honesty to admit that the lecture was convincing and that Peter wasn’t crazy. No one tried to cancel that invitation, so that was OK.
However, it was different a year or two later, when I wanted to invite David Rasnick (Peter Duesberg’s colleague, and also a friend of mine). For his formal seminar he was to talk about protein evolution with no mention of AIDS, but I was unwise enough to ask him to give a second, informal, talk about AIDS. That immediately caused protests (not from real researchers, but from two technicians) and I was forced to cancel that one. What annoyed us a lot was that the Director didn’t have the confidence to cancel it herself, but came to my office with the Administrator of the Institute, a big man with no authority over which researchers researchers can invite. People don’t want to hear things they disagree with! However, we went ahead anyway in a small room, inviting people individually. Not too surprisingly, very few came.
Not nobody. The Nebraska Writer’s Guild does. They insist you should never, ever, ever, no, never use a gerund. Or an adverb. Or an adjective.
I will admit, many writers overuse these tools, but to say never? That’s just lazy. That’s not wanting to think about when to use them, just saying if we never use them, we won’t overuse them. I tend to overuse them, too, so I go through my work several times and evaluate what is and isn’t needed. Do I need a stronger verb, or is the adverb right? So on and so on…
Makes me think of one of the member’s of my Master’s committee who told me not to use semicolons because he didn’t know how to use them, so he couldn’t evaluate them. I told him don’t worry, I know how semicolons are used. And so does my major professor. He could trust her even if he didn’t trust me on semicolon use. I put them in as needed.
Too many people are too lazy about writing. They don’t do the hard work of learning how, they just set up arbitrary rules that certain words are to be avoided at all costs. Though I will admit to having issued one such thing myself. I tell my students, if you don’t understand how pronouns are used, leave them out all together. If you haven’t used the noun, don’t use the pronoun. They have so many sentences that say the opposite of what they want to say because of using the same pronoun for every noun, and never using a noun.
Whaaaaaaat?
God I hate that simplistic Elements of Style crap. As you say, it’s maybe good advice for really bad writers and/or beginners, but it’s terrible for anyone else. Writing well requires using the right kind of word and the right punctuation for what you want to say in the way you want to say it.
There’s too much confusion of how reporters have to write with how everyone should write. They’re not the same! Writing has to be not boring, not clumsy, not ugly, not elementary.
My “favorite” dumb rule is “never use the passive voice.” I actually heard that from a senior lawyer once. Right, because there’s never a situation in legal writing where you intentionally want to downplay or be vague about how something happened….
Screechy, I hear that one from the Guild, too. They think your characters need to be doing things, active, not having things happen to them. Sometimes it’s important to make it clear that things are happening to the character, the character has no control, and is a passive participant, or passive victim.
Yeah, gee, all this having things happen to the character while the character is unable to act – how can anyone possibly make literature out of that?
signed,
Hamlet