Among the Intellectualoids / A Handbook for Maidens
Simon, Jolm
"Among the Intellectualoids / A Handbook for Maidens" bitter disappointment of it all." "Yes," Bonzo agreed. "I remember when I first raised this subject with Ron many years ago. He used to be a Democrat, you know, and that's why he believed in...
...Goddess" is not only permissible, however, but may indeed become preferable to the Christian God with his chauvinistic maleness...
...They do not tell us, however, how and by whom these investigations were conducted...
...From "myriad suggestions," they adduce co, E, tey, and besh...
...Finally, Miller, Swift, and their likes have no sense of euphony, of the sound words make..They wonder what is wrong with "repairer" for repairman and "launderer" for laundryman...
...Whole treatises have been written by feminists to prove the enormous psychic damage done to women by the grammatical masculinity of everyone and anyone--by our saying, for instance, "Everyone was in his place" or "Anyone can make up his own mind," and the like...
...but there is abundant recognition and remuneration for taking up the cudgels for the People and bludgeoning the language, logic, even mere common sense, with them...
...What Miller and Swirl conveniently overlook is the price we have paid for losing our second-person-singular pronominal form...
...Shame on you, Frank Reynolds...
...There are two further problems with Miller and Swift's position...
...But, along with like-minded feminists, Miller and Swift insist that "like 'generic' man, 'generic' he fosters the misconception that the standard human being is male...
...Communism is an evolutionist plot...
...He used to be a Democrat, you know, and that's why he believed in evolution...
...Gee," I was forced to admit, "I never realized that Darwin was a Marxist...
...And who but a committed feminist would conduct such an investigation...
...But even Branigin gives insufficient weight to the very nature of the Khomeini revolution: It is a pan-lslamic movement, claiming hegemony over all of the Muslim world...
...Miller and Swift then refer to "several recent systematic investigations of how people of both sexes use and understand personal pronouns...
...In their previous collaboration, Words and Women, our crusading authors wrote: At a meeting o f t h e Modern Language Association the story was told of twin girls who came home from school in tears one day because the teacher had explained the grammatical rule mandating the use of he when the referent is indefinite or unknown...
...Gone, all gone...
...But then I pointed out to him that On the Origin of Species and the first volume of Capital were both published in 1859...
...I shall address my remarks chiefly to this...
...Humiliation...
...After all these years, we're finally on the right track," he resumed, "and this time we're not about to fail...
...Do you grasp the full implications of this...
...even Saint Joan is no longer to be known as a heroine but as a hero...
...That a female could remain much longer like unto the lilies of the field--having, perhaps, to spin a little, but, with luck, not toil at all--was, and still can be, a piece of good fortune for the loss of which the title "woman," with its real or implied responsibilities, is hardly adequate compensation...
...Possibly, because it is in the nature of radicals who bitterly oppose laws that disagree with them to foist equally or more restrictive laws on people of another persuasion...
...as well as ha, from a novel by June Arnold, and person or per, from a book by Marge Piercy...
...A sense of injustice...
...The Washington Post investigated, found that Zumwalt was wrong, and printed a news story about it, right...
...The Shah, despite his reputation for bloody repression, was a passive victim of Khomeini's revolution in Iran,'and the Ayatollah made no attempt to mask his imperialistic ambition to extend the boundaries of his Shi'ite revolution to the entire Moslem world...
...A.O, Sulzberger, Jr., for example, noted the Sunni-Shi'ite conflict, observed that it had gotten worse since the Iranian revolution, and then dryly wrote, "statements by Ayatollah Khomeini urging the Iraqi Shiites to overthrow their 'satanic' Government has [sic] further disrupted Iraqi-lranian r e l a t i o n s . " The best analysis came from the Washington Post's William Branigin, who spelled it out clearly: "After he returned to Iran in triumph in February 1979 (Khomeini) set about encouraging Iraqi S h i i t e s . . . to rise against their Sunni Moslen leaders...
...Schanche produced a pure thumb-sucker from Cairo, an interview with "a Western scholar who has lived in both Iran and Iraq...
...Now, I ask you, who shall prevail...
...Both in life and in literature, the switch from you (formal) to thou (informal and intimate), or back again, carried enormous emotional impact...
...Poor girl--or woman: The Inquisition forced feminine clothing on her thus exposing her to the lust of her jailers...
...Take the question of girl versus woman...
...No news story at all...
...This use, therefore, "did not reflect a belief that masculine pronouns could refer to both sexes," our authors claim, on what evidence they do not choose to state...
...But i f " g i r l " applied to a person of nineteen or more is indeed something that makes red blood boil (blue blood, clearly, is immune to this demotic disorder)--if, in other words, it is an insult, an indecency, why is it all right for friends and kinfolk to use such filthy language to a woman of twenty...
...The danger is in that small concessions lead to big ones, that a few concessions lead to many, that one type of concession may encourage demands of quite a different type, and that the result will be chaos...
...Evolution is not a Communist plot...
...For recipes such as Cousin Ruth's Chicken and Okra Gumbo, Orange Cloud, Southern Sukiyaki, Bastille Crepe Cake, Crawfish Bisque, Jambalaya Robertson...
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...Unless perhaps an Act of Parliament, or some other such legislation, mandates (or, more properly, womandates) one of these pronouns into law...
...It is not till 1850, however, that "an Act of Parliament gave official sanction to the . . . 'generic' he . . . . The new law said, 'words importing the masculine gender shall be deemed and taken to include females.' " The authors conclude that "as a linguistic device imposed on the language rather than a natural development arising from a broad consensus [is there such a thing as a narrow consensus?] 'generic' he is fatally flawed...
...I can envision a time when someone casually saying "na duty" Robertson's Recipes of the Month, Inc...
...Take, for example, the war on the masculine pronoun in its all-encompassing sense...
...Add $2.00 for outside United States and Possessions...
...And, with that, he did indeed begin to weep, taking several minutes to regain his composure...
...Iraq did not adopt the "human rights" solution so dear to the hearts of Carter loyalists (according to which the followers of tile Ayatollah get full civil liberties, are not subjected to tear gas or arrest, and are encouraged to form political parties), and invaded Iran...
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...In a cogent introductory statement," our authors report, "the publishers explain the purpose of the innovation and the reasons for their selection of hir...
...When I think of all the time we Wasted back in the old days trying to kick the Communists out of the union, when what we really should have been doing was going after the evolutionists, why, it's enough to make a grown chimp weep...
...The FBI in Peace and War: If you want to learn how the American press really works, follow the accounts of the trial of former FBI officials Felt and Miller, at this writing under way in Washington, D.C...
...If I were frivolous, I could remark that at least half of such statements carry a negative value, and that women might count themselves lucky to be excluded from such asseverations as "Everyone is dumber than he ought to be" or "Anyone can become the victim of his gullibility...
...One wants to be the champion of progressive causes, repressed minorities--in short, the People--and so takes it out on the English language...
...Typical human reasoning," Muggs said impatiently...
...And all this for a chimera...
...Why wouldn't a girl of ~wenty or twenty-two, regardless of the color of her blood, exult in her girlhood, than which there is no lovelier condition known to humanity...
...It is unlikely that any woman can recapture her feelings when the arbitrariness of that rule first struck her consciousness: it happened a long time ago, no doubt, and it was only one among many assignments to secondary status...
...The government is queasy about the trial because delicate secrets--as they say--may emerge, and this prompts long whispered conversations between the judge and THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1980 31...
...But I did not see this written anywhere, at least in the first week of fighting...
...The feminine ending -ess is not acceptable to women who, it seems, must be called actors and sculptors, not actresses and sculptresses...
...Name: Address: City: Gift card to read "From Name: Address: State: .Zip: City: Gift card to read "From .State: Zip: to someone who usually says "hesh duty" will be overheard by someone else who uses "tey duty" in the presence of yet another accustomed to "hir duty"--and the result will, of course, be Babel...
...However that may be, by allowing irresponsible alterations in the language, we are not only losing the necessary touch with the glories of our literary past, we are also inviting a linguistic turmoil that must lead to the breakdown of everyday communication in the not so distant future...
...In the just-published Handbook of Nonsexist Writing," Casey Miller and Kate Swift--two journalists who previously collaborated on the book Words and Women--have a rela"l.ippincott, $8.95...
...to attempt to refute the Handbook point by point, I would have to write a book myself and stoop so low as to debate the authors about why I still prefer "manhole .cover" to their "utilityhole cover," the kind of casuistry I'd just as soon put a lid on...
...You have to be pretty monomaniacal and tone-deaf to ignore the ugliness of repairer and of the erer in launderer...
...A few pages later, though, our authors go back even on their "late teens" deadline and cite with approval a reference to "young women in the thirteen-to-sixteen-year age-group...
...Yet if women consider themselves included under "actors" and "Sculptors," why do they feel excluded by "everyman" or "journeyman" or other such no longer masculine endings ? Contradictions proliferate...
...Still, you might interject, where is the danger in making a few footling concessions if the result is peace in the republic...
...As a result, Khomeini's explicit attempt to destroy the current (Sunni) regime in Baghdad got lost in the verbiage...
...We would not be in serious danger from Miller, SwifL and their sorority if we still had prescriptive grammarians, if the vast majority of linguists and lexicographers were not of the descriptive and permissive persuasion that abrogates the right to pronounce one usage correct and another incorrect...
...This was no accident, no mere coincidence...
...What emotions had reduced them to tears...
...The reason is political...
...Consider now a simple sentence, say, "Everyone must do his duty," which could become, "Everyone must do co [or E, tey, hesh] duty...
...Inconsistency is everywhere...
...The only reason "boy" is not coextensive in age with "girl" is that, unfortunately, there are pressures on males to go out and make a 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1980 living before they have had the time to become "men," and they duly turn into charmless, premature adults lacking that sense of the child in man that Nietzsche rightly admired...
...the workman who collects garbage will smell no sweeter even if it becomes compulsory to call him Philosopher King...
...Thanks to changes in our language--some in the cause of simplification, but many more based on political interest or sheer ignorance--Shakespeare is already heyond the reach of most people, Chaucer has to be read in second-rate modernizations, and Dryden, for the amplitude and elegance of his rhetoric, is not read at all...
...And not even rabbits could produce parthenogenetically a litter between a main and a subordinate clause...
...Take the case of feminist English and its demands from, and depredations on, Standard English...
...Miller and Swirl first define their attitude thus: "A person may appropriately be called 'a girl' until her middle or late teens...
...Clearly, this is the same kind of upgrading that turns Undertakers into funeral directors, garbage collectors into sanitation workers, maids into household technicians--in other words, part of that self-serving, unrealistic procedure that tries to exalt the humdrum, and thus contributes to the confusion of meanings, debasement of values, and erosicm of notions of excellence...
...That's not the point at all...
...Reynolds then said: "ABC News has learned that the Washington Post will report tomorrow that Zumwalt's accusation against Aaron is innaccurate...
...Isn't it odd that in no non-Englishspeaking country have women's groups found it necessary to quarrel in this mode with the language for psychopolitical (or is it psychopathological) reasons...
...After that, although her family and close friends may go on calling her a girl with impunity, most redblooded women find the term offensive...
...Sorry, no charging...
...They cite at length and with palpable approbation recent attempts to coin "a new sex-inclusive singular pronoun...
...One is self-contradiction and consequent wishy-washiness...
...now the sisters are foisting a masculine ending on her, thus depriving her of the double glory of being simultaneously a female and a leader...
...This seems simple enough, but American journalists preferred to "go academic" and offer learned sermons on sixteenth-century conflicts Michael Ledeen is Executive Editor of the Washington Quarterly...
...Got it...
...Washington, D.C...
...But it isn't odd at all that the only authority of any kind whom Miller and Swift actually quote by name in this section of their book is not a grammarian, linguist, writer, or other word-oriented person, but an obscure psychologist now called Wendy Martyna, though in a book she edited in 1972 she was still Wendy Martin...
...Laundress is presumably unacceptable because of the feminine ending...
...Superseded, perhaps, by a consensus of broads...
...Just a denial from Aaron's colleagues and friends...
...20002 when the feminists deem it so...
...attracted considerable interest because they are threatening to "tell all": that is, explain why the FBI felt the Weathermen were a serious threat, and had to be kept under unusually close surveillance...
...Well, I could go out into the street right now to do a little questioning of my own and find contrary evidence aplenty...
...The worst treatment comes from Don A. Schanche of the Los Angeles Times, a newspaper that in my view is about the best in the country these days...
...tively long chapter on "The Pronoun Problem...
...Bonzo and Muggs very graciously provided directions to Marineland of the Pacific where, they assured me, there were several intelligent and articulate dolphins who would confirm everything they had said...
...But since Miller and Swift are against such legislation, could this happen...
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...S[INNI DAYS by Michael Ledeen Everyone's favorite ayatollah suddenly found that there are rulers in the Middle East that do not take kindly to calls for their removal...
...That certainly places things in a new light...
...They even reach back to the nineteenthcentury eccentric Charles Converse, who proposed than (a contraction of that one), and approvingly mention the new supervisors' guide of American Management Associations, published by AMACOM (which sounds like some dreadful film from Feilini's artistic dotage), in which/sir is used "as a common-gender pronoun meaning he or she...
...Such usage has allegedly convinced countless women through history that they were second-class citizens, excluded from full participation in humankind or, as male supremacists through the ages have called it, mankind...
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...For much as our embattled authors advocate such constructions as "I shouldn't like to punish anyone, even if they'd done me wrong" (this from George Eliot), the construction is manifestly illogical and grates on any ear connected to a thinking brain...
...Grammarians, they continue, later invented the so-called "generic" he in an attempt to change the long-established English usage (as Miller and Swift call it) of "they as a singular pronoun," of which they give quite a few examples from good writers, e.g., Lord Chesterfield's remark, " I f a person is born of a gloomy temper . . . they cannot help it...
...Inaccuracy in Media: The award for worst one-liner of the month goes to Frank Reynolds of ABC Television News, who on the night of 16 September reported that Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, former chief of naval operations (and now in the Reagan organization) accused David Aaron of the National Security Council staff of leaking the story of the "Stealth Bomber" to the Washington Post...
...between the Ottoman and Persian Empires, and even on the seventhcentury division between Sunni and Shi'ite Islam...
...Or it could become "everyone must do na [or person, per, than, /sir] duty...
...Anger...
...This doctrine, preached from the mosques and radios oflran ever since February 1979, had taken concrete form in Iraq, where Khomeini had explicitly called upon the local Shi'ites--more than half the population--to overthrow the regime of President Assad...
...But let me be strictly serious...
...That is the key difference...
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...And what, pray, has happened to the "broad consensus" that was said to be required to justify such a change...
...I was much encouraged by the upbeat tone the interview had taken and I thought it an appropriate time to depart...
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...Wrong...
...Bear in mind, however, that no change ever stops there, wherever the particular there may be...
...Note, however, the inconsistency of the latter two when, in The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing, they argue that because in the past the prescriptive grammarians permitted the plural you to become singular as well and displace thou, nowadays the plural they should be allowed, in spite of the grammarians, to become singularized when necessary, or A dear-eyed view of the reality of Mexico...
...One cannot get remuneration, votes, or even a pat on the back from the language...
...One would have hoped that at some point, the American analysts would have noticed that none of this happened when the Shah was in power, and speculated that perhaps Carter's foreign policy was in some way related to the new catastrophe...
...These two unfortunate gentlemen are accused of conspiring to violate the civil rights of the Weathermen some years ago, and the trial has...
...Remember the great couplet from Pope's Essay on Criticism: "Our sons their fathers' failing language see,/And such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be...
...Those unnamed twins whose eyes brimmed over with tears of anger, humiliation, or righteous indignation at such organized grammatical misogyny, or the tradition of good English that has functioned for centuries, that accords with other Indo-European languages, and that, despite the unrecapturable feelings THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1980 29 of any woman, did not condemn her to secondary status, but allowed her to become Jane Austen or George Eliot, or even Casey Miller or Kate Swift...
...The outcome allegedly showed that "at all levels of education people whose native tongue is English seem to know that he, him, and his are gender-specific [lovely word?] and cannot do the double duty" of representing both men and women...
...Miller and Swift's first point in the representative chapter under discussion is that when the early English grammarians used masculine pronouns in a seemingly bisexual way, they were actually writing "grammars . . . for male readers in an age when few women were literate...
...Although Miller and Swift are perfectly satisfied with the singular they, another solution also holds evident appeal for them...
...A HANDBOOK FOR MAIDENS by John Simon What, one might well ask, does the sacrifice of a few words matter as long as the social fabric is strengthened thereby...
...The Post-along with just about every o t h e r paper following the "Stealth" story --carried a White House denial of Zumwalt's charges...
...but alumnae, with its feminine ending, is a must to women who would feel discriminated against if subsumed under alumm...
...The real point was that Marx was a Darwinist...
...This scholar gave us the bread-andcircuses theory of history: "Both nations have the same urgent need to divert attention from devastating domestic problems, so they make war . . . . But Iraq had extra reasons, so it started the war...
...This, even aside from ending with a sentence that does not parse, is curious...
...Think only of what poets, n6velists, painters, and sculptors--male and female--have done to glorify the term " g i r l " ; if the word becomes synonymous: with "child," all their works will lose much of their meaning and beauty...
...John Simon is the author, most recently, of Paradigms Lost...
...It is hard to resist the conclusion that feminists either hate their feminity or smart under their lack of feminine comeliness--unhealthy situations both...
...if by committed feminists, the results would most likely reflect what the investigators set out to prove...
...In fact, a logical mind might be thrown by Eliot's sentence, and go looking for some antecedent to they other than that inappropriate anyone...
...I do not care how many good writers have at times fallen into such i l l o g i c - - t h e r e simply is no way in which anyone or everyone can suddenly multiply, as if it were a rabbit, into a they...
Vol. 13 • November 1980 • No. 11
