A Person Paper on Purity in Languages

[pne]

An interesting article that John Cowan pointed out to me—using "black" vs "white" to talk about sexism in language (including, but not limited to, pronouns).

Comments

Re: chairwoman

[marikochan.livejournal.com]

I agree -- I prefer gender-neutral terms to distinctions by gender, and I'm fairly likely to choose the traditional male term when there's no preexisting gender-neutral one. I don't feel very odd calling a woman a "chairman," and I call myself a "webmaster." After all, who objects to "author"? But that was originally a male term (the female equivalent being "authoress").

I'm often upbraided for this attitude, but I think the way to lessen the distinction is to use words as if it's not there; a chairman can be male or female, as can a secretary (re: someone else's comment below). To me, the ideal are terms that have no connection to the gender of the person being referred to.

Of course, this mainly works because English isn't a very gendered language anymore in the first place...