schrafinator responds to me:
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The point I am making is that the original claim of "the sexism in our language is so ingrained" is simply not true. The language isn't sexist.
Of course it is.
Says who? You? Why should we believe you? Since the vast majority of speakers of English understand the use of "he" in the neuter and since we both agree that languages are defined by how people actually use the word, why is it that suddenly your opinion about the language gets to trump the majority of people who actually use it?
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It doesn't matter what the original gender of the word "he" is if nearly everyone who speaks English understands it to be masculine and uses it that way.
And it doesn't matter what your personal social/political agenda is if nearly everyone who speaks English understands it also to be neuter and uses it that way.
You are not the final arbiter of English. It is one of the most commonly spoken languages on the planet. The overwhelming majority of those people use "he" in the neuter and they get to override your personal opinion about what the word ought to mean.
We all get it...you don't like "he" to be both masculine and neuter.
Tough noogies. Until you get to control the thoughts of everybody, they'll continue to use "he" in the netuer as well as the masculine or until such time as they decide of their own free will to stop using it for both.
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It's not strange or uncommon to address a all-female group and say, "Hi guys." Of course, one can do the same to a mixed group or a group of all-males. But if one were to describe someone as a "guy", it is immediately understood that the person't gender is male.
Yes...and? Your point? You do realize that you're talking about two different words, right? You do understand that "guys" is not the same word as "guy" and that nobody uses "guys" when they really mean "guy," yes? The word "guys" has a definition of a group of people of either a single, male sex or a group of people of indeterminate sex. The word "guy," on the other hand, is much more strongly attached to the masculine, though even then it can be used for women since there is the rhyming comment, "Hi, guy!"
Therefore, since everybody who speaks the language understands the word can mean both solely-masculine and non-solely-masculine, the term isn't sexist. It isn't like a woman who, upon greeting her girlfriends, shouts out, "Hey, you guys!" suddenly thinks she's addressing a group of men or that the group is shocked to hear themselves being addressed as if they were men. Everybody understands that "guys" means "group of people" without necessarily saying anything about the sex of the people in the group.
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Also, what about the fact that the use of "Mister" makes no reference to the marital status of the male,
Yes, it does. Unmarried males are correctly referred to as "Master," not "Mister."
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yet "Mrs." and "Miss" indicate the marital status of the female. "Ms.", which does not indicate marital status, was only invented a few decades ago during the last wave of feminism.
Indeed. But notice how quickly it caught on. And even then, all speakers of English still understand what all the words mean.
You're confusing usage with etymology again. The language isn't inherently sexist.
The usage, on the other hand, can easily be.
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Rrhain
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