{"id":303,"date":"2014-01-10T21:26:49","date_gmt":"2014-01-11T01:26:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/hoochie\/?p=303"},"modified":"2017-10-31T21:28:28","modified_gmt":"2017-11-01T01:28:28","slug":"lord-balks-at-gender-neutral-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/hoochie\/2014\/01\/10\/lord-balks-at-gender-neutral-language\/","title":{"rendered":"Lord balks at gender-neutral language"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Pepper...<\/a>
Pictured: “Pepper… and Salt” cartoon, Wall Street Journal, 1\/9\/14<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Over at The Chronicle Review<\/em><\/a>, Geoffrey Pullman<\/a> (of the Language Log<\/a>, etc.) has a “Lingua Franca” column dealing with the objection of certain parties in the British House of Lords to the proposal to use gender-neutral language in the framing of future laws. He writes:<\/p>\n

Lord Scott<\/a> defended what\u00a0The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>calls \u201cpurportedly sex-neutral\u00a0he<\/em>\u201d: the old-fashioned notion that saying \u201canyone who thinks he deserves it\u201d doesn\u2019t exclude females. (Of course it does. There\u2019s a reason why it sounds silly to say \u201cYou can bring either your father or your mother if he wants to come\u201d\u2014he<\/em>\u00a0simply cannot be understood as covering your mom.) […]<\/p>\n

The debate cried out for the professionals to be called in. And to my delight, as I read on in the\u00a0Hansard<\/em>\u00a0record of the debate<\/a>, I saw that they had one: Lord Quirk of Bloomsbury, a distinguished scholar of English grammar and usage, and a former vice chancellor of the University of London, was next to speak.\u00a0[…]<\/p>\n

Of purportedly sex-neutral\u00a0he<\/em>, \u201cthe convention that masculine pronouns are deemed to include feminine reference,\u201d he said:<\/p>\n

\n

If it ever worked, that convention no longer does, and there have been convincing psycholinguistic experiments showing that sentences such as \u201cAnyone parking his car here will be prosecuted\u201d predominantly call up images of a man doing the illicit parking.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And he further noted a shockingly strong tendency in certain legislative amendments to stick entirely to purportedly sex-neutral\u00a0he<\/em>\u00a0whenever the pronoun referred to a judge. (The high-level judiciary in Britain is almost entirely male.)\u00a0[…]<\/p>\n

A final stinger: Pullum notes in his last graf that each<\/strong> one<\/strong> of the “grammatically ignorant old sexist fools” who spoke in the debate was…. male.<\/p>\n

Inset image from <\/em>The Wall Street Journal\u00a01\/9\/14.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at The Chronicle Review, Geoffrey Pullman (of the Language Log, etc.) has a “Lingua Franca” column dealing with the objection of certain parties in the British House of Lords to the proposal to use gender-neutral language in the framing of future laws. He writes: Lord Scott defended what\u00a0The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language\u00a0calls … Continue reading Lord balks at gender-neutral language<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7073,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[121],"tags":[428,429,430,431,264,432,175,433],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/hoochie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/hoochie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/hoochie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/hoochie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7073"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/hoochie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/hoochie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":304,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/hoochie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions\/304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/hoochie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/hoochie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/hoochie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}