Help! I recall reading a book where, in the preface or introduction, the author explained that they would not be using any “he / she” nonsense or sprinkling in "she"s or "her"s, not because he’s a sexist, but because 1) there is a long-established precedent of the non-sexist, inclusive masculine pronoun, as in “mankind” and 2) because it debauches the language.
I believe it was a book by an Austrian – Rothbard, Hazlitt, Block, Rockwell, or some such, but I can’t remember who it was or what book it was!
It was a very clear and convincing excerpt and I would like to reference it to defend my position to a friend. Any pointers greatly appreciated!
I remember reading something as such, agggggggges ago. It seems like a Block kind of comment, though I scanned his pdf’s of books and others mentioned - no dice.
Yeah, I definitely thought it sounded quintessentially Blockian as well, but for some reason, I thought I remembered it not actually being him. I want to say it was Rothbard, but it doesn’t appear to be in “For a New Liberty” and I’m not sure what else it would have been… Arrrg.
Interestingly Japanese doesnt have gender-specific pronouns. In fact that contributed to a minor problem with the Metal Gear series, when in Metal Gear Solid 4 it was revealed that a previously mentioned, but not seen, ‘Dr. Clarke’ was in fact a woman…when she had been referred to as ‘he’ throughout the English versions of the previous games.
I dunno why I felt like sharing that. Other than to point out that not all languages actually have gender specific pronouns. In fact I think its mostly a Europian(German and Latin) thing…
"The use of the traditional inclusive generic pronoun “he” is a decision of language, not of gender justice. There are only six alternatives. (1) We could use the grammatically misleading and numerically-incorrect “they”. But when we say “one baby was healthier than the others because they didn’t drink that milk,” we do not know whether the antecedent of “they” is “one” or “others,” so we don’t know whether to give or take away the milk. Such language codes could be dangerous to baby’s health. (2) Another alternative is the politically-intrusive “in-your-face” generic “she,” which I would probably use if I were an angry, politically-intrusive, in-your-face woman, but I am not any of those things. (3) Changing “he” to “he or she” refutes itself in such comically clumsy and ugly revisions as the following: "What does it profit a man or woman if he or she gain the whole word but lose his or her own soul?
Or what shall a man or woman give in exchange for his or her soul?" The answer is: he or she will give up his or her linguisitc sanity. (4) We could also be both intrusive and clumsy by saying “she or he.” (5) Or we could use the neuter “it,” which is both dehumanizing and inaccurate. (6) Or we could combine all the linguistic garbage together and use “she or he or it,” which, abbreviated, would sound like “sh…it.”
I believe in the equal intelligence and value of women, but not in the intelligence or value of “political correctness,” linguistic ugliness, grammatical innacuracy, conceptual confusion, or dehumanizing pronouns." ~ Peter Kreeft, Socratic Logic
Whoever wrote it, I think it’s an important point of English that is mostly forgotten. “Man” by itself is equivalent to the Latin “homo” and Greek “anthropos”, i.e. a human being. Now it just so happens that it is also a masculine gender word - but note that one can use the unchanged form “anthropos” in Greek to mean a woman (you simply attach the feminine definite article to clarify). So a female human being is indeed a “man”. The problem is that in English “man” also has the sense of Latin “vir” and Greek “aner”, i.e. a male human being. It is this latter meaning which seems to be the only one people know, especially due to feminist propaganda. The truth is that there is nothing gender specific about the words “mankind” or “fisherman”.
Throughout this book I use the word “man,” in the tradition of
Western-civilization scholars, to designate the concept of an animal
possessing the capacity to reason. This is the meaning Aristotle (and
other Greeks) gave the word anthropos, from which “man” is a trans-
lation. Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary reports that the original
meaning of the term “man” is the “thinking” or “intelligent being,” not
a male person. Substituting such terms as “men and women,” “people,”
“persons,” “humankind,” or “human being” for the word “man” excises
from the English language the concept of “rational animal.” Such exci-
sion surrenders the intellectual foundation of Western civilization
and its life-giving achievements. Consequently, I use the word “man”
to refer equally to females and males. (Even the word “human” is not
an exact synonym of “man,” for according to the OED, it often means
“mundane,” “secular,” “opposed to the divine,” implying limitation or
inferiority.)
The problem is that people keep talking about “gender” when they mean “sex”, in order to avoid using the word “sex”. They’re not the same thing. (Of course there’s something “gender-specific” about words like “fisherman” – namely, it’s of masculine gender. Which has precisely nothing to do with the sex of any particular instance of “fisherman”. The Anglo-Saxon word for “woman” was masculine, too…doesn’t mean Old English women were men in drag!)