Iqra’i

Feministing links to an article by David Gelernter decrying the degendering of language. Some of his points are, I admit, a little overblown, but generally I agree.

Much to my mother’s distaste, I have come to use the “he” rather than “he or she” or “they” to refer to a hypothetical human being. (Also, when I am interspersing my thoughts with quotations from Hannah Arendt, who — victim of the patriarchy as she was^[1] — only uses “he,” it reads much better than way.) Things that are not specifically coded as feminine are inherently coded as masculine. The female is other, and our language represents this.

However, the most interesting thing (aside from the very cute suggestion that we return to the traditional Old English werman and wifman, reserving man for the equivalent of homo or anthropos), was learning that the singular “they” is not, in fact, a hideous neologism that squats on the face of the English language like an obese toad.

In fact, Jane Austen has been known to use it.

Now, make it a Brontë and I’m sold.

^[1] And by “patriarchy,” I mostly mean Martin Heidegger. This had far more to do with her mental health than her pronoun choice, though. One day I will write a post about Simone de Beauvoir’s relationship with Sartre and Arendt’s with Heidegger. It may be titled “Arguments for a Separatist Philosophical Commune,” and will probably include a plan for importing men to do heavy lifting, getting things from tall shelves, etc., then returning them to the wild.