Ok let me get this straight, some stupid people made some mistakes and thought you were a guy. From this you have concluded that the English language is invalid and everyone should ignore the basic rules of it?
If people mistake my pet for a bat does that mean that we shouldn't call the wooden stick you hit things with a bat? Because this is effectively the argument you are making here, that you were hurt/annoyed by people making a mistake and using one meaning of a word so the other meaning is invalid.
No. I'm saying that being called by the incorrect pronoun sucks, and if both pronouns are incorrect, then we'd better make a third one. Language changes. It has changed, so that "he" is no longer really gender-neutral (if it ever really was in the first place). If I said "Zounds" instead of "Shit," would I be correct? Not really. How about saying "I cannot abear it" rather than "I cannot bear it," or calling a woman handsome ("Why,
hello there, handsome woman!") or saying "women glow" instead of "women sweat?" Hell, how about archaic spellings? We changed that crap for a reason, and now we've got a damned good reason to change the language again.
I also like the part where we call everyone "he," which implies that men are the main gender lying around and worth worrying about. Would it be all right if we arbitrarily switched to she as the gender-neutral pronoun--because after all,
it's just one little letter? I'm certain you'd be okay about being the "weird" gender, right? Because being male is
standard, so we can use male pronouns whenever we don't know with no problems. I am referring, of course, to the notions expressed in
The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir.
Your "bat" example is fallacious because context allows one to figure out that one is talking about an animal, rather than a wooden object. The context of human gender does not inform one that one does not know whether someone is female or male, and is thus using he. It informs the listener that they are to address the person in question as male and
behave as though that individual were male.
Yes, writing is different. We write "he" or "she" to denote an arbitrary person. But this is a different matter. This is about speech and forms of address to
specific people, not arbitrary individuals.
Language as an edifice is sensible only so long as it is
effective. If the laws of physics changed, we would construct a new mathematics. As the social structure changes, we construct new language.
That is how it goes, and no matter how much one may adore the purity of one structure over another, the times are changing and our literary systems must change along with them.
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Topic: Suddenly, a third gender (Read 17033 times)