English, gender and God

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Contrary to popular myth, I do not see sexism everywhere, and I do not assume that people are being deliberately sexist when they have not come right out and said something obvious.

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In my experience, deliberate and conscious sexism, like deliberate and conscious racism, is relatively easy to counter, if not to solve. Taking a clear opposite positon promptly is often enough to deal with the immediate situation - but the long term causes need continuing social change.Ingrained, habitual, attitudes are much more difficult to deal with, but do still need to be dealt with promptly, if only as a form of aversion therapy for the hapless ingrainees . I think your response to Paul was entirely appropriate.I remember as a child hearing my grandmother's comment on Kenneth Kaunda appearing on television: Isn't he black, the poor soul? In her way, she probably wished him nothing but good. Even at the age of ten, I knew this was something that needed to be countered. It was almost twenty years later that she apologized for punishing me.You don't need me to tell you to fight the good fight, schraf. Better to have one person think you a little rude (and it only appears to be one) than to let it go by without comment.

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Thanks. I'm feelin' the love.

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As Austin Powers would say Feel it, baby! Grrrrrrrrr.

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Just as an aside, is there a reason why some people are spelling my nickname with a capital H? I don't recall putting it in there that way and it doesn't appear to be that way in the "Author" fields. Perhaps I'm just being paranoid.

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It's likely because Hain is an English surname, and sounds like one, so we are subconsciously fitting you into our linguistic experience. But don't worry we're not getting at you - it's ingrained, not deliberate.

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What pronoun would you suggest one use to refer to Mr. Einstein?

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I keep asking this over and over, but nobody seems to answer it.

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Most everyone has answered it in their own way. I addressed it over 60 posts ago in message 19. Just because you didn't get an answer in the terms you would like, doesn't mean it wasn't answered.The correct answer to an irrelevant question can be to point out its irrelevance; and the trouble is, no one but you thinks your question is in any way relevant to the matter in hand. Further, in over 60 posts you have falied to persuade any of us that it should be.The matter under discussion has nothing to do with a pronoun used in passing of one whose gender is not in question - the issue has to do with attitudes to pronouns used when gender is the very issue at hand.The question you should be asking is more like What pronoun would one use of one when referring to Jaye Davidson's character in The Crying Game?

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How could it not be? Paul responded in English, did he not? If it's ingrained, he cannot help but think that, can't he?

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So you go with Sapir-Whorf on this one? Very curious.

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It's simple logic: If you claim that 2 + 2 = 5, then you must necessarily also be claiming that 2 = 3.

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Wouldn't you be claiming that 2 = 2.5? I do hope your logic is better than your arithmetic!

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If you claim that someone is using sexist language, then you must necessarily be claiming that the person is sexist since there are plenty of ways to avoid sexism in speech, are there not?

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Not if they are unaware that the language they are using is sexist. You seem determined to dance around the point of this particular pin. For my part I am beginning to find it contrived and tiresome. I suspect schraf and crashfrog feel the same way.

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Rh: What pronoun would you suggest one use to refer to Mr. Einstein?
I keep asking this over and over, but nobody seems to answer it.
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But nobody actually gives me the specific word that ought to be used.

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This is priceless. Later in the post I asked what pronoun Rh would use to describe an apparent transgender character in a movie. His answer was ...

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If the person sees the character as male since the character has a penis, then the pronoun is "he." If the person sees the character as female since the character lives as a woman despite having a penis or is perceived as a woman, then the pronoun is "she."
See how simple that was? You asked for a pronoun and I gave you the specific ones.

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Note the specific ones. Rh's answer is basically the same as an earlier one I gave in post 19 about the pronoun one would use for God: I think they should use the pronoun they prefer.So the answer to all these questions is that one should use, not one specific pronoun, but the pronoun one thinks appropriate. I cannot suggest that one use a specific pronoun about Einstein unless I want to comment on Einstein's gender. The question is in fact an example of a many questions construction - because the real issue would be better phrased as What gender do you believe Einstein to have been, and, given that gender, what pronoun would you suggest one use to refer to him? Thus, Rh's claim that we are avoiding his straightforward question is disingenuous - we are avoiding his misleadingly straightforward question, which hides the issue which is really under discussion. That's what I am getting at.

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I really want to know. What pronoun would you suggest one use to describe Mr. Einstein?

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If one sees Einstein as male for whatever reason then the pronoun I would recommend is he. If the person sees Einstein as female for whatever reason, or example this writer http://members.cts.com/king/n/ndanger/980428/einstein.htm, then the pronoun I would recommend is she.
See how simple that was? You asked for a pronoun and I gave you the specific ones.

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Um, I'm looking at post 19 and it's by crashfrog, not you.

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Look again.

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I don't recall you giving me a word. I'm asking you for a word. A single word.

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No single word, a choice of words depending on the speaker's view of Einstein's gender - just as in your answer, an approach I commend.

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... you haven't demonstrated, at least not to my satisfaction, that the question is irrelevant. I find it very relevant. So relevant, in fact, that I wonder why you are doing everything you can to avoid answering it directly.

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I wish I knew why you find it relevant. I'm at a loss to see how one can extrapolate from a usage about Einstein to a usage in a case where a gender pronoun is actually being called into question.

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Argumentum ad populum.

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No - this was not an argumentum ad populum. An argumentum ad populum would be to claim the truth of the proposition on the basis of the population supporting it. You may be right and we may be wrong - our numbers have nothing to do with it. But the fact that none of us on this thread, except you, believes your question about Einstein to be relevant, explains why no one is answering it. It was answering your question about Einstein that was the subject of that point, not the more general proposition about appropriate pronouns.

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And in over 60 posts, the three of you have failed to persuade me that it isn't.
But surely you aren't arguing that because it's three against one that makes it true, are you?

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Absolutely not. Never would. But it does explain why the discussion is going the way it is.

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When was it determined that the gender is at issue?

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When Paul eye-rolled the word She used of God.

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And if you don't know, who are you to tell him that his pronoun is wrong?

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Actually, he implied my pronoun was wrong.[This message has been edited by Mister Pamboli, 05-15-2003]

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Rhhain: What I am saying is that given Paul's opinion that god is male, then it is not unusual to hear him refer to god as "he" nor is it sexist for him to do so.

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Actually, there was no objection whatsoever to Paul's use of a pronoun - it was Paul's objection to my use that was commented on.

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I continually ask and never get an answer, what pronoun would you suggest one use to refer to Mr. Einstein?

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You have been answered fully and in some detail by me, at least. It is still beside the point. The relevant questions would be more like If it is clear that two people hold different views about Einstein's gender, what should the reaction of one of them be to the other's usage, and, if that reaction should be critical, how should the other party, in turn, react.I appreciate you might prefer to tackle a reduced subset of these, but unfortunately the tack you are taking is simplistic rather than simplified.

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I am simply pointing out that we should not be surprised by a person who thinks of god as male having some sort of reaction to seeing god referred to as "she."

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I'm sure crash, schraf and I were not surprised. We kinda expect it due to the ingrained sexism of the language, as we see it's effects, and possibly even fall victim to it ourselves, from time to time.

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You, yourself, used "man" in the neuter. That would appear to me, at least, that you have some sort of understanding that words like "he" and "man" have neuter meanings ... If you aren't going to believe yourself, who are you going to believe?

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Crahsfrog gives another excellent example of ingrained sexism, as I'm sure crashy won't be in the slightest offended by that, or take it as an accusation. I found myself this morning betraying some surprise that the plumber who came to fix our sauna was, in fact, a woman. Her reaction - of distinct, slight, but tolerant offense - was appropriate and measured, just like schraf's.

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Paul thinks god is male. Therefore, where is the sexism in then calling god "he"?

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No sexism in that - but sexism in criticising my usage of She

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How is it sexist to refer to males as "he"? And to react when those refer to males as "she"?

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It depends on the reaction, and it depends on the extent to which the user of he is confident of the maleness of the referent, or aware of differing views of the gender of the referrent. If the reaction was It's interesting that you say She. Can you tell me why? there would be no issue. Let's rephrase your question: How is it sexist to refer to what you believe to be males as "he"? And to react negatively when others refer to what you believe to be male as "she"? Doesn't appear quite so reasonable now does it?And then, of course, there is the chosen form of criticism: an eye-roll. There is no OED of body language, but I would be surprised if many here disagreed that an eye-roll in the context it was used implies a prior knowledge of the issue under contention, and it's contentiousness.

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Oh, and by the way...I did answer the question. Mister Pamboli asked me a very similar question quite directly and I gave him a direct answer, indicating the specific pronouns to be used.

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PronounS. You couldn't answer with one, but had to contextualise the response. Now why was that? Lack of honesty? Lack of integrity? Lack of courage? Or was it not appropriate to give a single pronoun? Perhaps the example could not be reduced to the simplistic level of your Einstein example?You are still trying to reduce this to a simplistic issue. Crashfrog, at the very least, has the intellectual integrity not to oversimplify an issue, nor to be browbeaten into taking a position that could be used to mislead others who may not follow the thread closely.

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Rhhain: where is the sexism in his statement that refers to god as "he" and finds the use of "she" to be incorrect?
crash: The sexism is in his refusal to grant a difference of opinion about god's gender anything more than a summary dismissal via eye-rolling.
Rhhain: You mean cries of sexism are to be honored above reality? We really ought to refer to Mr. Einstein as "he or she"?

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I cannot follow your reasoning here. What do you mean by honored above reality? What is the reality above which crash is honouring a cry of sexism? What on earth has your Einstein example to do with this?

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Actually it's a sexist habit that I'm not proud of, but habits are hard to change since they're not deliberate.

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I have an understanding that, while "he" and "man" may have a neuter usage on the surface, they rarely communicate a neuter meaning - listeners to those words rarely find them inclusive to women at first glance.

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Exactly. I have observed that in my peer-group it is exclusively males who use man or mankind as encompassing terms, and that this usage rarely goes uncommented upon if women are present.I use the term encompassing rather than neuter because the usages refer to situations where males and females are included. If the terms were truly neuter to my peer group one could use them to refer to groups of females, such as this chemical appeared to cause cancer of the ovaries in Man. This usage stand out as extremely odd in my peer-group, though I am aware of many examples from earlier decades - examples which sound frankly comical today.

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The most I can say for myself is that I don't use those terms in speech, only in print. Which is probably worse than the other way around, come to think of it - but I guess it just goes to show that one's speech and one's writing are different dialects.

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My lecturer in English language used to say that as a rule of thumb We write the way our parents talked. As a rough guide it seems to describe what goes on pretty well.

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perhaps a reference to writing styles typically being more formal than spoken English? Or, even better, to the fact that spoken slang outstrips written styles?

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Both, I think. Of course, as he said himself, he wasn't referring to James Joyce, and it wasn't intended as a fully descriptive rule.Sadly, the old guy is dead now, but he was talking in the late 70s when he himself was in his 60s. In the last 25-30 years we have seen very informal writing becoming much more common, on the internet of course, but also in the public prints. Interestingly, though, it doesn't follow speech, but has its own diction and phrasing. Blogs are fascinating to mine for the patterns in informal writing and there is a lot of good work being done on the linguistics of blogs, internet chat and SMS messaging.

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Since false premises can lead to any conclusion, it is important to point them out lest we spend a lot of time going down an unjustified path.

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Ar you sure you meant to say that? False premises lead nowhere on their own. Only arguments move from one proposition to another.

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There is a difference between the concept that a woman can't be a surgeon and a man can't be a nurse and the concept that the language prevents one from saying that a surgeon is female and a nurse is male.
That is, just because many people find it difficult to talk of nursing without using feminine pronouns doesn't mean the language is forcing you to use feminine pronouns. If there were a linguistic rule of nurses being "she," then we might have a claim of "bias in the language." But as there isn't, it ain't.

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That's true. Except that you seemed to think earlier that words have a certain meaning in reality which is separate from usage. In which case, does not nurse mean in reality a woman who gives suck to a child? Of course, one may argue that usage has removed that bias and moved on from that meaning, with which I would agree. I would argue, then, that just as usage has removed the bias from this term, so usage has ingrained a bias in the use of he.

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There are many times when a dictionary is proscriptive.

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Not in English. Maybe in French, where the Academie attempts to rule what constitutes correct French. Doctor Johnson wished his Dictionary to "fix the language" but admitted eventually that it could not be done. The Oxford has never pretended to more than description.

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... there are times when a person is simply wrong in what was said. While the person may think that what was said is indicative of what was meant, there are times when it simply doesn't.

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But your examples, reasonable as they are, are of individual usages, not of usages shared amongst a community of users.

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English insists that negation requires a "not" or a derivative in there somewhere ... No negation in the structure of the utterance, no negation in the meaning of the utterance.

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I like anchovies? I like them like s**t.

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There is a structure of the language that exists outside its speakers.

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In what does it exist? What is its mode? How is it manifested?

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I am saying those patterns exist, even if only in the abstract: We all agree that those are the rules and that if you break them, you aren't saying what you mean to say.

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But you also seem to saying that these patterns can change. I am sure no one would disagree with that. The issue at hand is how users should react to usages which are in flux or appear to be in flux. How are we to know, for example, whether a usage is wrong (as you might say) or whether it is simply shifting its meaning. Perhaps Vizzini's overworked inconceivable is taking on a meaning which Inigo is powerless to prevent? How are we to decide if it is Inigo or Vizzini who is wrong?

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But here's the thing: You were right. It doesn't matter how much a person may complain that he thinks the word is derived from "apologize." He's wrong. It doesn't mean that. No matter how much he can complain about the usage, he's wrong.

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Now you seem to be confusing etymology and meaning - an oversight? Or do you think nurse really means a breastfeeding woman.

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Why is it we don't hear people complaining nearly as much about the need for a "you, general" pronoun to contrast with the "you, specific" pronoun?

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Because they can use forms such as y'all or youse? Or because they can use simple circumlocutions - such as all of you.

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People often write in the second person as a generalized concept, and yet we (and here I'm using the first person as a generalized concept) rarely get confused as to which is which. And if there is confusion, a clarification is requested and made and we move on without people making accusations of "getting personal."

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Yes I agree. Paul should have done exactly that - sought clarification and we could have moved on.

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But the fact that Paul refers to god as "he" and "corrects" those who call god "she" is not sufficient to justify a claim of sexism.

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Correct in the case of Paul, but ...

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But by the same token, schraf shouldn't have cried sexism. It was indicative of her jumping to a conclusion.

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Not really. Remember that schraf is contextualising this in a continuing history of bias. You may want to treat Paul's post as an atomic utterance, devoid of any context, but schraf is entitled to do otherwise. She would have been jumping to a conclusion had she claimed Paul was personally sexist - as the only evidence she had was his post - but she did not do that: she claimed the language had sexism ingrained.

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though we would prefer he not be rude about it

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And there's the rub: he was rude - it wasn't the challenge, but the dismissive attitude that led to schraf's comment. You yourself have recognized it. All this sidetracking about what Paul sincerely believes and the irrelevant guff about pronouns and Einstein really does distract from the core issue: schraf's assertion that Paul's rude responsewas the result of ingrained sexism in the language.

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Yes, I am sure I meant to say that.

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Fair enough: but no games. Sorry if I got you wrong. I thought you were perhaps discussing traditional logic, in which the truth or falsity of premises is of little interest, but the method of reasoning is paramount.

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Logical error: Equivocation.

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Indeeed it would be, which is why I riased the point.

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We seem to have switched from "nurse" meaning "one who gives care, especially one who does so under the supervision of a physician" to "nurse" meaning "one who breastfeeds."

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Exactly, the word has evolved two meanings, one of which is strongly gender-specific and the other isn't. The newer meaning of a medical care-giver has evolved by usage. Yet, in an earlier post, you claimed: ... reality trumps usage. The word doesn't mean that no matter how many people think it does.But if this true, then there is no equivocation, for you frequently hint that a word really means what it's etymology implies. If there is equivocation, then it is because usage enables us to move between meanings which are radically different from the implications of the etymology.

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Again, I am wondering if you are simply playing games.

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No games - I am just trying to get a handle on what you are trying to say about language having some sort of platonic form distinct from its usage.

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Rh:There are many times when a dictionary is proscriptive.
Pamboli: Not in English.
Rh: You mean people don't go to dictionaries to look up the meaning of words as if they were proscriptive?

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Of course one may arbitrarily decide to use a dictionary proscriptively - Scrabble players do it all the time. But the proscription comes from the readers decision to be proscribed to. Dictionaries, unlike languages, have an intentional intelligence behind them, so we can say that the dictionary itself is not proscriptive, even though it may be used in that way.(Do you know the delightful book Cod Streuth by Bamber Gascoine. If not, I recommend it - if I read you right, you would love it. A monk is captured in 1560 by Brazilian cannibals, who think his 10 pages of Rabelais (Book 3: 26-28) are the Bible they have been promised. The monk is made patriarch and rather than admit the error, he attempts to use them to convert the natives using Rabelais. The Passion Play which turns into an orgy is particularly fun.)

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It is never appropriate to say, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means"?

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It can, of course, be justified, within a community of users. If I use the word doubt to mean expect - a fine Scots usage - an Englishman may well raise Inigo's point. After all, I doubt he'll not pay you would have exactly the opposite meaning in one community of users and another. Any such question therefore can only be justified in so far as an assumption can be justified that all in the conversation belong to the same community of users with reference to the word under discussion.Why the latter qualification, with reference to the word under discussion? Because otherwise homogeneous communities of users may have sub-communities with different usages for specific terms.

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Like it or not, linguists are not the only ones who look up words in a dictionary. People who actally use the dictionary will often consider it a proscriptive text. The reason why we so often say that dictionaries are descriptive, not proscriptive, is precisely because people actually use dictionaries as proscriptive texts.

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Agreed, as mentioned above.

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Hmmm...seems like you got the "derivative in there somewhere." It's an implication...negation of pleasure from s**t, ergo the equivalence of pleasure between anchovies and s**t results in the negation of pleasure from s**t.

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Nice wriggling, but I'm not buying it. There is no derivative of not in here. Think back to what you were saying about Youngquist's poems and how the difference between them was not something the language can tell you.

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How many times have we heard the old saw, "'Ain't' ain't a word and I ain't gonna use it"?

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Once!

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It sums it all up: There is a recognition that there is some sort of abstract, official, "The Way Things Are Supposed to Be" (C) attitude and a realization that it doesn't mean diddly since the language is a tool of the users.

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I disagree. I think there are those who would like there to be such a thing, frequently in pursuit of a social agenda intended to entrench a caste who are entitled to proscribe the activities of others. Your example might well serve to illustrate this.

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But here's the thing: You were right. It doesn't matter how much a person may complain that he thinks the word is derived from "apologize." He's wrong. It doesn't mean that.

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In you second post you say The word is not derived that way but in the first, It doesn't mean that. I get the very clear impression that derivation and meaning are very closely equivalent to you - to the extent that you seem to think that the derivation is somehow the real meaning of a word. Back to nursing again ... ?And there is a reality to usage, too, including definition.

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If dictionaries are descriptive, not proscriptive, then the definitions we find in there must mean that there are people out there, and a not insignificant number at that, who use the word in that way. Therefore, to complain that a word is being used in that way when we can see from the descriptive source that plenty of people do use it that way is to be a bit disingenuous.

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Agreed.

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And on the flip side, just because a single person uses a word in a certain way doesn't mean the word really means that.

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Well, it may mean that for a community of one user! And that raises the interesting point as to whether language actually does require a community: that is, greater than one user. Would a person raised entirely without communication with any other being have anything that could be called language?

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I'm thinking of words like "absotively" and "posilutely"...people know those "aren't real words," but they use them anyway because they like them.

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Except that such words may make it into a dictionary - in which case, do they become real? Has the dictionary made them real, or were they real beforehand?

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Pamboli: Because they can use forms such as y'all or youse? Or because they can use simple circumlocutions - such as all of you.
Rh: No, that's make a distinction between singular and plural as well as throwing in accent. I mean a distinction between the general case and the specific case. Those times when you have to clarify, "When I say 'you,' I don't mean you, specifically."

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Not accent, surely? Dialect, perhaps. But the circumlocutions are neither dialect or accent, are they?

Curious examples Rh chooses to show the common use of the word niggardly today.The first three are all in the context of budgeting. Two explicitly use the term niggardly budget - one from 60 years ago(!) and one postdating Howard's case which brought the phrase into the public eye. Really all this shows is that niggardly budget may be a cliche in the circle of those who discuss budgeting.Your fourth example is from a web page which is hardly representive of common English usage - for one thing the word niggardly is used here to construct the acronym NAZI and a related acronym NAZM.So we have:
a sixty year old example;
one use of the exact phrase in question postdating the very public controversy over that phrase;
another use in the same context as the phrase in question also postdating the public controversy;
a forced example of the word being used to create an acronym in another racially-charged context.Persoanlly, I think the Encarta dictionary gets the issue just right: Although the etymology of niggardly and niggard remains subject to debate, these words probably have a Scandinavian origin not associated historically with the origin of the offensive word Negro and its related offensive racist slurs. These are derived ultimately from Latin. Niggardly, then, is in no way a racial slur. However, the fact that the word sounds as if it might be one is reason to consider context very carefully before using it.As ever, the onus in the natural course of language is on the speaker or writer to take account of their audience or readership, rather than the formalized social niceties built on an idealized view of language that Rh seems to prefer.