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stillnotking
Joined: 18 Dec 2007
Location: Oregon, USA
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 Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 6:24 am Post subject: |
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| mises wrote: |
| During my presentation I used the word "he" to describe a common citizen. As in, the citizens are yadda yadda and he is less burdened yadda yadda". I was absolutely dressed down for 30 minutes by some woman from the UK for not using "she" or "they". No further comment on my paper was offered. |
That's typical of postmodernism in general. The theory is that people's attitudes are literally created by the language and images they are exposed to -- we are all blank slates, to be written on willy-nilly by every author who comes along.
The most chilling implication of this is that speech is a weapon, deserving of official regulation. Hence the most pernicious academic doctrine of modern times, the political correctness movement. |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 8:41 am Post subject: |
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| mises wrote: |
| During my presentation I used the word "he" to describe a common citizen. As in, the citizens are yadda yadda and he is less burdened yadda yadda". I was absolutely dressed down for 30 minutes by some woman from the UK for not using "she" or "they". No further comment on my paper was offered. |
The woman is an idiot. "They" would be incorrect, as it is a plural pronoun. Did she offer any arguments as to why "she" would be preferrable to "he"? I can think of no valid arguments, but I would not be huffy if someone chose to use the word "she" to describe a common citizen, or alternated the gender pronoun use to distinguish different nouns:
The common citizen is important to our society. His participation in the process is needed. The journalist, too, has a duty. She must inform him. Together, he and she fulfill important roles in our society, etc, etc. |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 3:02 pm Post subject: |
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| Kuros wrote: |
| mises wrote: |
| During my presentation I used the word "he" to describe a common citizen. As in, the citizens are yadda yadda and he is less burdened yadda yadda". I was absolutely dressed down for 30 minutes by some woman from the UK for not using "she" or "they". No further comment on my paper was offered. |
The woman is an idiot. "They" would be incorrect, as it is a plural pronoun. Did she offer any arguments as to why "she" would be preferrable to "he"? I can think of no valid arguments, but I would not be huffy if someone chose to use the word "she" to describe a common citizen, or alternated the gender pronoun use to distinguish different nouns:
The common citizen is important to our society. His participation in the process is needed. The journalist, too, has a duty. She must inform him. Together, he and she fulfill important roles in our society, etc, etc. |
No, 'they' is not incorrect and is now recognised as another form of the third person singular. I have been using it since I was a tiny kid, and as an ESL teacher I made certain that it was recognised in standard speech (at some point when I was teaching pronouns). I haven't got time to google up any references, but I am quite confident that it is perfectly standard these days. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 7:10 pm Post subject: |
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Thanks for the comments! It was disappointing and undid any ideas I had of further academic work.
Fortunately, several profs came to me after and expressed dismay at the woman and her words. But none were apparently brave enough to say anything during her rant. |
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bacasper
Joined: 26 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2008 4:43 am Post subject: |
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| Big_Bird wrote: |
| Kuros wrote: |
| mises wrote: |
| During my presentation I used the word "he" to describe a common citizen. As in, the citizens are yadda yadda and he is less burdened yadda yadda". I was absolutely dressed down for 30 minutes by some woman from the UK for not using "she" or "they". No further comment on my paper was offered. |
The woman is an idiot. "They" would be incorrect, as it is a plural pronoun. Did she offer any arguments as to why "she" would be preferrable to "he"? I can think of no valid arguments, but I would not be huffy if someone chose to use the word "she" to describe a common citizen, or alternated the gender pronoun use to distinguish different nouns:
The common citizen is important to our society. His participation in the process is needed. The journalist, too, has a duty. She must inform him. Together, he and she fulfill important roles in our society, etc, etc. |
No, 'they' is not incorrect and is now recognised as another form of the third person singular. I have been using it since I was a tiny kid, and as an ESL teacher I made certain that it was recognised in standard speech (at some point when I was teaching pronouns). I haven't got time to google up any references, but I am quite confident that it is perfectly standard these days. |
| Dictionary.com wrote: |
they
� plural pronoun, possessive their or theirs, objective them.
3. (used with an indefinite singular antecedent in place of the definite masculine he or the definite feminine she): Whoever is of voting age, whether they are interested in politics or not, should vote. |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2008 6:17 pm Post subject: |
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Furthermore, it has been around a bloody long time:
Canberra Society of Editors: A singular use of THEY
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It isn't new
The entries from the Oxford English Dictionary forcibly demonstrate that the use of they to refer to a singular noun is not an innovation of recent decades or even of this century. The first citation in the Dictionary's files is from the 14th century so that we know that the practice had been adopted in writing at least by then. There may have been much earlier examples which have been lost and the practice may well have been established in speech before it found its way into writing.
In adopting they with singular reference we are simply following a long established convention of the English language.
Furthermore, as our illustrations from literature on this page demonstrate, the usage has enjoyed continued strong support down the centuries. Even those who are universally regarded as among the finest composers of our language can be found using they with singular antecedents and as far back as 1926, H W Fowler, of Modern English Usage fame, declared that as anybody can see for themselves was the 'popular solution' (pp 391-392).
Equally significant, the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary prepared the entries for the letter t between 1909 and 1915. In other words, lexicographers have been recognising this use of they as normal standard practice - despite what some grammarians say - all this century.
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Some Examples of its ancient use:
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Now leaden slumber with life's strength doth fight,
And every one to rest themselves betake William Shakespeare
So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not everyone his brother their trespasses The Bible (King James Version)
God send everyone their heart's desire William Shakespeare
Little did I think ... to make a ... complaint against a person very dear to you, but don't let them be so proud ... not to care how they affront everybody else Samuel Richardson
Everybody fell a laughing, as how could they help it Henry Fielding
A person can't help their birth William Thackeray
But how can you talk with a person if they always say the same thing Lewis Carroll
Some people say that if you are very fond of a person you always think them handsome Henry Jones
I know when I like a person directly I see them Virginia Woolf
Everyone was absorbed in their own business Andrew Motion
'There's a bus waiting outside the terminal to take everybody to their hotels,' said Linda David Lodge
Nobody would ever marry if they thought it over George Bernard Shaw
You just ask anybody for Gordon Skerrett and they'll point him out to you. Scott Fitzgerald
Nobody stopped to stare, everyone has themselves to think about Susan Hill
His own family were occupied, each with their particular guests Evelyn Waugh |
I do not recall, as a child, teachers saying "Who has not done his or her homework?"
or
"Someone left his or her pencil on my desk."
Rather they said: "Who has not donetheir homework?"
and "Someone has left their pencil on my desk." |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2008 6:43 pm Post subject: |
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| Big_Bird wrote: |
Furthermore, it has been around a bloody long time:
[Big Bird posts a list of historical mistakes to prove that using they in the singular is a timeless mistake]
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Strunk & White, p. 60, The Elements of Style
They. He or She. Do not use they when the antecedent is a distributive expression such as each, each one, everybody, every one, many a man. Use the singular pronoun. |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2008 8:09 pm Post subject: |
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| Kuros wrote: |
| Big_Bird wrote: |
Furthermore, it has been around a bloody long time:
[Big Bird posts a list of historical mistakes to prove that using they in the singular is a timeless mistake]
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Strunk & White, p. 60, The Elements of Style
They. He or She. Do not use they when the antecedent is a distributive expression such as each, each one, everybody, every one, many a man. Use the singular pronoun. |
Yes, there are those that will tell you not to do it. Check this website out for instance: http://www.getitwriteonline.com/archive/121101.htm. These people will no doubt tell you not to boldly split the infinitive, and that ending a sentence with a preposition is something we should not put up with.
To those prescriptive grammarians, I say "f*** off you stupid b*****ds" and "get real."
Most linguists will agree with me, even if they are slightly better mannered. 
Last edited by Big_Bird on Wed Apr 30, 2008 8:17 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2008 8:17 pm Post subject: |
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| Big_Bird wrote: |
| Kuros wrote: |
| Big_Bird wrote: |
Furthermore, it has been around a bloody long time:
[Big Bird posts a list of historical mistakes to prove that using they in the singular is a timeless mistake]
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Strunk & White, p. 60, The Elements of Style
They. He or She. Do not use they when the antecedent is a distributive expression such as each, each one, everybody, every one, many a man. Use the singular pronoun. |
Yes, there are those that will tell you not to do it. Check this website out for instance: http://www.getitwriteonline.com/archive/121101.htm. These people will no doubt tell you not to boldly split the infinitive, and that ending a sentence with a preposition is something we should not put up with.
To those prescriptive grammarians, I say "f*** off you stupid b*****ds" and "get real."
Most linguists will agree with me. |
Nobody's telling you not to split your infinitives. I do that all the time just to, you know, do it. I'm not even saying that using 'they' as a singular is problematic in normal everyday speech. But for formal writing and speech-making, it is incorrect usage.
And the reason I brought it up was that some academic was telling miles that using the pronouns properly was improper, but using 'they' in the singular was perfectly proper. If our conversation resolves nothing, its that the use of 'they' in the singular is at least controversial. |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2008 8:19 pm Post subject: |
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| Did you not see that I was referring to the website of the Canberra Society of Editors? If they're now agreeing it's OK, that's a sign that it's becoming accepted as correct in formal English. |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2008 8:28 pm Post subject: |
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| Big_Bird wrote: |
| Did you not see that I was referring to the website of the Canberra Society of Editors? If they're now agreeing it's OK, that's a sign that it's becoming accepted as correct in formal English. |
Okay. But just this year, my professor made it very clear that 'their' was not okay as a replacement for 'he' or 'she' in formal writing. Listen. I don't think you do any harm by teaching it in ESL. In fact, I think its helpful, because in daily speech many use 'their.' But, it is not appropriate in formal writing.
I also don't know who the Canberra Society of Editors are. But they don't grade my papers, so . . . |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2008 8:42 pm Post subject: |
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| You are both right. It is increasingly as Big_Bird reports in informal and spoken English; and it is also as Kuros says in formal, American English. |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2008 8:45 pm Post subject: |
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| Gopher wrote: |
| You are both right. It is increasingly as Big_Bird reports in informal and spoken English; and it is also as Kuros says in formal, American English. |
Oh, how cute! Gopher the diplomat!  |
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Manner of Speaking
Joined: 09 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2008 8:54 pm Post subject: |
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| Big_Bird wrote: |
That book has had a lot of criticism - I tried to find one of the better peices that explored its shortcomings but (short on time) I only found this from Amazon:
| Quote: |
Amazon.com
Evolutionary psychology often stomps where other branches of science fear to tread. Case in point: A Natural History of Rape. Randy Thornhill, a biologist, and Craig T. Palmer, an anthropologist, have attempted to apply evolutionary principles to one of the most disgusting of human behaviors, and the result is a guaranteed storm of media hype and debate. The book's central argument is that rape is a genetically developed strategy sustained over generations of human life because it is a kind of sexual selection--a successful reproductive strategy. This runs directly counter to the prevailing notion--that rape is predominantly about violent power, and only secondarily about sex.
The authors base their argument partly on statistics showing that in the United States, most rape victims are of childbearing age. But disturbingly large numbers of rapes of children, elderly women, and other men are never adequately explained. And the actual reproductive success of rape is not clear. Thornhill and Palmer's biological interpretation is just that--an interpretation, one that won't withstand tough scientific scrutiny. They further claim that the mental trauma of rape is greater for women of childbearing age (especially married women) than it is for elderly women or children. The data supporting these assertions come from a single psychological study, done by Thornhill in the 1970s, that mixes first-person interviews with caretaker's interpretations of children's reactions.
While Thornhill and Palmer claim that they are trying to look objectively at the root causes of rape, they focus almost entirely on data that support their thesis, forcing them to write an evolutionary "just-so" story. The central problem is evident in this quote, from the chapter "The Pain and Anguish of Rape":
We feel that the woman's perspective on rape can be best understood by considering the negative influences of rape on female reproductive success.... It is also highly possible that selection favored the outward manifestations of psychological pain because it communicated the female's strong negative attitude about the rapist to her husband and/or her relatives.
Women are disturbed by rape mostly because they are worried about what their husbands might think? In statements like this, the authors repeatedly discount the psychological aspects of rape, such as fear, humiliation, loss of autonomy, and powerlessness, and focus solely on personal shame.
A Natural History of Rape will no doubt have people talking about rape and its causes, and perhaps thinking about real ways of preventing it. In fact, the authors suggest that all young men be educated frankly about their (theoretical) genetic desire to rape. And it reopens the debate about the role of sex in rape. But without more and better data supporting their conclusions, Thornhill and Palmer are doing the very thing they criticize feminists and social scientists of doing: just talking. --Therese Littleton
From Publishers Weekly
Can we get rid of rape? If not, how can we reduce it? Biologist Thornhill (University of New Mexico) and anthropologist Palmer (University of Colorado) contend in this already highly controversial book that prevailing explanations of why men rape and how we can prevent them rely on wrong, dangerous and outmoded dogma. The right explanations for rape, they contend, as for all other human behavior, rely on Darwinian models of natural selection. Rapists want sex, they say. Rape, or the drive to rape, is an adaptation: some of our ancestors increased their reproductive success by mating with unwilling partners, and the brain-wiring that led them to do so got passed on to their male descendants. Women, meanwhile, have evolved adaptations against rape, and against getting pregnant if they are raped. What we call rape happens in most if not all cultures; nonhuman primates rape, too. Among the policy consequences if Thornhill and Palmer are to be believed: teenage boys should be educated to acknowledge and control their lust, and young women should show less skin and be chaperoned more. Using surveys of rapists and victims, and analogies from the animal kingdom, the authors make provocative claims about specific motives for rape, specific reactions to it and ways to test their hypotheses. One study suggests that young women become more risk-averse "in the follicular (fertile) phase of their menstrual cycles"--unless they are taking birth-control pills, in which case menstrual phase and risk-aversion won't correlate. This suggests a real anti-rape adaptation. But Thornhill also claims his own research has shown that rape victims of reproductive age (12-45) feel worse afterward than older and younger victims. One wonders how he measured young girls' or older women's pain. (Apr.)
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http://www.amazon.com/Natural-History-Rape-Biological-Coercion/dp/0262201259
I've never heard that rape was soley devised to keep women in line - but it certainly is used to keep women in line in some circumstances. Rural Pakistan comes to mind.
Anyway, some of the problems with the book are that they don't really look at how successful rape is as a method of reproduction. How many pregnancies take after a single rape? After the trauma of rape would a women really do her best to care for the new life in her? I would want to abort it, frankly. Short of that, I would probably not eat properly and be in poor mental (and then) physical condition which would not be good for the child. I imagine that the incidence of miscarriage might be higher than average for rape victims. All that stress can not be good for the foetus. And could you properly love a child that was borne of rape? I think a lot of women might detest their child and abandon him/her, or at least severly neglect the child. Some woman (so f**ked in the head by the memory of the rape) might punish their offspring in some way, for the sins of the father. Well, some of the latter concerns assume that the human female understands the correlation between the rape and the pregnancy - but even so, the trauma of the rape would not be very conjuicive to a happy healthy pregnancy.
The most succesful way of ensuring the continuation of his DNA is for a man to get a woman to fall for him and be in a committed partnership with him. That way he has regular sexual access to her, and is far more likely to successfully impregnate her, and he can also protect and guard the vehicle of his DNA (her) - helping to keep her healthy and happy so that she carries the baby successfully - and then sticks around a while to protect his child while he/she is still extremely helpless. Raping seems the desperate loser's way of trying to produce offspring. Moreover, it's not so good for the species if the female isn't able to select the best mates to fertilise her eggs and has to accept any old rubbish that comes her way.
And how about all this raping of elderly women and 6 year old boys? The book doesn't adequately explain why so many men fantasise about or engage in rape of people who can not possibly be used as a vehicle for their DNA. Nor do they explain why so many rapists enjoy causing so much pain and humiliation to their victim - how will this assist in carrying on their DNA?
My other problem with their book is that if rape is such an excellent way to reproduce, why aren't all men rapists? Perhaps I'm very naive, and all the male posters on this forum are daily and desperately controlling their urges to rape in order to remain good citizens, but I find it hard to believe. It seems to me that only a minority of men have the urge to rape, and most men would feel great aversion to intercourse with an unwilling woman. If a thousand rapes happen in a town in one year - that's not one thousand rapists at work. Some of those rapes will be committed by the same perpetrators. Most men do not rape. |
The advent of Evolutionary Psychology in recent years has been an interesting phenomenon...Evolutionary Psychologists offer some interesting theories and explanations of some aspects of human behavior. Its most glaring drawback, however, is that some of their ideas and theories are extremely difficult to prove. I remember last summer being home in Canada, reading an article in the Globe and Mail about how a couple of evolutionary psychologists at a US university did a study on "kissing strategies" (of all things) by US undergrad students, and concluded..."kissing is a universal phenomenon and strategy to induce bonding with the opposite gender"...or some such nonsense.
My first thought was, how do you respond to the fact that ethnographically speaking, kissing is not a universal phenomenon. In Thai culture, kissing was traditionally considered disgusting; "eating each other's dirt" was how one 19th-century Thai writer described it. Yet the study authors did not hesitate to extend the results of their "study" to encompass all human behavior. Regardless of the fact that they did not reproduce their study in more than one culture. Evolutionary Psychology seems to be the latest academic fad.  |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2008 9:05 pm Post subject: |
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| The first time a boy kissed me mouth to mouth I nearly puked! Horrible and germy. I punched him and ran away. I was only 8, though. |
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