sexist language
Griff Smith
ggs at ulysses.homer.nj.att.com
Fri Nov 11 08:24:49 AEST 1988
In article <1988Nov9.200939.6069 at utzoo.uucp>, henry at utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
> In article <698 at packard.UUCP> shz at packard.UUCP writes:
> >Just a minor correction: Substitute "staff" for each occurrence of "man"
> >in the below fragment, yielding "staff-hours", "staff-weeks" and
> >"staff-years".
>
> (I have no quarrel with people who prefer to avoid the use of masculine
> words as generic forms, provided that readability does not suffer, but
> criticizing people for using legitimate English is ridiculous.)
> --
> The Earth is our mother. | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
> Our nine months are up. |uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu
This has gotten a bit out of context. The original complaint was from a
Bell Labs employee who was reacting to company policy; in my branch of the
Labs we are corrected by our supervision whenever we refer to generic employees
with masculine words. If I remember correctly, the first response to that
complaint came from another AT&T employee who has either missed the required
Affirmative Action sessions or taken inoculations against them. I think
the first posting was a sincere attempt to point out that the worm fighters
weren't just males. I suspect the second one was more a rejection of company
policy than a complaint about the posting. We're not criticizing people for
using conventional English, we're criticizing the convention.
This is already too much noise for a technical group; further arguments off-line please.
--
Griff Smith AT&T (Bell Laboratories), Murray Hill
Phone: 1-201-582-7736
UUCP: {most AT&T sites}!ulysses!ggs
Internet: ggs at ulysses.att.com
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