By the way, I think s/he stinks! (IMHO) When I talked about a slash in my other
post I was alluding to he/she, which I think was the original usage in the post
by Erika that prompted me to start this whole mess! ;) I think s/he is just too
weird... As Ben Jones said, how DO you pronounce that? :/
I have never had a problem with the conjunction "or", though, as in "she or he"
;) I am willing to put up with a little choppiness in the flow here and there,
because it makes me very happy to see my gender included in things, for a chang
e, SCIENCE OF ALL THINGS!!! ;) Personal preference, of course.
Re: Ben Jones post
After paraphrasing my original statement to: "it will be a sad day when scienti
fic literature accomodates an authors "political" views over its duty to educat
ion and accuracy.", this was followed by agreeing that current usage is not ade
quate. So should we continue to use "his, "he", in cases where a female person
could be equally included in the context of what is being said because it read
s better than "he or she"? That way the author's "political" views are not acc
omodated over what the primary goals should be... Should we continue this pract
ice until the scientific community agrees on what neuter usage it is going to a
bide by? Talk about drawing a line, huh? My point exactly.
And about the erradication of sexism:
I feel that the random usage of either pronoun is still sexist. I see the intro
duction of, for example, only the word "her" just as sexist as the usage of onl
y the word his and I, too, (as I believe Ben Jones stated) find myself having t
o stop and read back because it throws me off, though in some contexts it might
work. Sexism can work both ways, and if one is wrong, then so is the other.
Neuter pronouns: (again, Re: Ben Jones post)
I think that feminists and chauvinists alike would dislike the usage of neuter
pronouns such as "it" because it makes them feel like objects rather than human
beings, which is the connotation "it" usually has, although maybe the more rad
ical wings in both camps might dislike such usage for obvious reasons in addit
ion to the object thing. I think it would certainly be a compromise, though, wh
ich is what it should be all about, that way neither sex gets preferential trea
tment while keeping with the desire to maintain good flow during reading. My na
tive language is Spanish, in which it works out perfectly because we have the p
ossessive pronoun "su" (pl.=sus), absolutely genderless. We actually do not hav
e an "it", though, so when the pronoun is the subject of the sentence, things c
an get a little messy from my perspective. ;)
My original anger stemmed from the referral to his/her political correctedness
as "crap", although the string has now taken an interesting and informative tur
n towards grammatical correctedness. It seems, though, that if there is one thi
ng we have agreed on so far is that the subjeect (be it PC or whatever you want
to call it) is far from being "crap".
Marivonne Rodriguez
