Hello Ardith,

Thursday November 22 2018, Ardith Hinton wrote to Michael Dukelsky:

 MD>>  Actors were put before actresses. It is sexism! :-)

 AH>>  The author put these words in alphabetical order.  So
 AH>>  would I.  I've noticed people using "actor" in reference
 AH>>  to both at times and I could write an essay on the
 AH>>  subject, but I'll leave it at that for now....  ;-)

 MD>>  I am looking forward to reading your essay. 

 AH>            On one hand I'm thinking "Me & my big mouth!"... on the
 AH> other I know I'll have a great time organizing my thoughts about
 AH> various things I've learned over the years because one of my
 AH> correspondents has expressed an interest.  ;-)

It is good you've made a decision to share your thoughts with us.

 AH>            Until the 1960's, schoolteachers used formal grammar... and
 AH> expected their students to do likewise.  My grade two teacher, e.g.,
 AH> insisted we speak & write in complete sentences at all times.  She'd
 AH> repeat "have you not" until we figured out for ourselves that she
 AH> meant "haven't you" because... as I now know
 AH> ... contractions aren't used either in formal English or in literature
 AH> intended for beginning readers.  In those days no explanation was
 AH> offered, however.  The way many Authority Figures dealt with
 AH> colloquial English was to ignore whatever they didn't approve of...
 AH> and from that standpoint I appreciate the descriptive approach taken
 AH> by modern dictionaries, in which they report what people say but
 AH> include flags like "colloq." or "coarse slang" or "[Aus./Cdn./UK/US]"
 AH> so we can make our own choices as to what works best in a particular
 AH> situation.

 AH>            You may have seen jokes elsewhere of a type I'd describe as
 AH> "gallows humour" from senior citizens about how, if one didn't say

What is gallows here? Is it vicious, perverse, wicked or is it a gibbet,
derrick?

 AH> "Miss Stickler, may I please go to the lavatory?" one would be
 AH> completely ignored or be forced to sit through a lecture on the
 AH> difference between "can" & "may" or wait until recess.

Hm-m-m... For me it is a strange joke, it is not funny at all.

 AH>            When our daughter went to the same school I noticed the
 AH> sign "GIRLS' LAVATORY" had been truncated to "GIRLS".  In many ways
 AH> that makes more sense to me than pictures which could be interpreted
 AH> as meaning "males wearing kilts" or "females wearing trousers".  In
 AH> the sink-or-swim environment of my childhood, I learned a lot about
 AH> English which I didn't fully appreciate back then....  :-))

I understand you mean that girls' feelings were neglected. But saying of
sink-or-swim environment in general. It may be cruel, but it prepares a young
person to a real life, doesn't it? It is interesting to hear what this
environment manifested in? Has anything changed since then?

 AH>            Things began to change during the 1960's.  People
 AH> questioned many of the rules they'd grown up with... one being the use
 AH> of the masculine pronoun in situations where the gender of any
 AH> individual may not be obvious.  According to the rules of formal
 AH> grammar "each student should bring his own pencil" is quite correct,
 AH> unless all of the students are female.  Some women didn't like that...
 AH> they felt they were being ignored, especially when the word "man" was
 AH> also used to refer to human beings in general.  I thought it was silly
 AH> that if I had just one male student in a class of forty I was required
 AH> to say "his", although when I read professional literature I noticed
 AH> that nurses & elementary teachers were referred to as if they were
 AH> invariably female.  For many people nowadays it's a lot easier to use
 AH> the plural pronoun regardless of the actual gender or number.

 AH>            Re occupational titles people can no longer take it for
 AH> granted that firemen & mailmen are male... so they are called fire
 AH> fighters & mail carriers.

Well, it is maybe OK with mail carriers, but firemen have very physically hard
and dangerous work. Do you think it is good when women want to do a physically
hard work?

 AH> The majority of such titles appear to be
 AH> gender-neutral even if they weren't in the past.  There are still
 AH> exceptions, though.  While waiters & waitresses have been replaced by
 AH> servers it would not be safe to assume a governess is a female
 AH> governor...

In Russian a governess is rather a governor's wife.

 AH> and I must admit to some puzzlement over the increasing
 AH> tendency to refer to both actors & actresses as actors because I would
 AH> imagine their gender is a legitimate job requirement if e.g. the
 AH> casting director wants somebody who can handle the role of Prince
 AH> Charming or Snow White in a live-action film.  In animated films I can
 AH> see from the credits that males play female roles at times & vice
 AH> versa... but I probably wouldn't know otherwise.  If what matters is
 AH> the sound of their voice rather than their physical appearance I can
 AH> think of other situations like that too.  But when Meryrl Streep
 AH> describes herself as an actor I'm not sure I understand her line of
 AH> reasoning.  I guess she likes the idea of a unisex job description &
 AH> I'm not averse to it myself.  OTOH, she's old enough to remember when
 AH> some feminists would have been outraged about her choice.  :-)

Here the society is more conservative and we have no such changes in the
language yet. They are still ahead, but I think such changes are inevitable. On
 the other hand one can never say how much time must pass before the changes
start. When I was young it seemed that "socialism" we had here was forever. But
 it unexpectedly crashed. So maybe the changes in the language you talked about
 may also come to us much earlier than somebody may imagine.

Michael

... node (at) f1042 (dot) ru
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