Among the Intellectualoids / A Handbook for Maidens

...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...

...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...

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...Communism is an evolutionist plot...

...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...

...And all this for a chimera...

...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...

...One wants to be the champion of progressive causes, repressed minorities--in short, the People--and so takes it out on the English language...

...Both in life and in literature, the switch from you (formal) to thou (informal and intimate), or back again, carried enormous emotional impact...

...Goddess" is not only permissible, however, but may indeed become preferable to the Christian God with his chauvinistic maleness...

...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...

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...And what, pray, has happened to the "broad consensus" that was said to be required to justify such a change...

...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...

...M IEB 9 aa eo~aa~ $4.00 o[ Modem k~xko Where Capitalism and Communism may soon clash...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...Bear in mind, however, that no change ever stops there, wherever the particular there may be...

...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...

...And who but a committed feminist would conduct such an investigation...

...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...

...Do you grasp the full implications of this...

...THE NEW IMPERIALISM: CUBA AND THE SOVIETS IN AFRICA Phi/lip Abbott Luce, $4.00 CASTRO'S GULAG: THE POLITICS OF TERROR Frank Calzon, $3.00 THE WASHINGTON LOBBY ON LATIN AMERICA Allan Brownfeld, $2.00 THE AFGHANISTAN CONFLICT IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE AND A BUYER'S GUIDE TO THE SALT PROCESS Miklos K. Radvanyl and Ronald F. Docksat, $1.50 Please send me: My total plus 75r postage is $ Name Address City/State/Zip Mail to: Council for Inter-American Security 305 Fourth St...

...But let me be strictly serious...

...Reynolds then said: "ABC News has learned that the Washington Post will report tomorrow that Zumwalt's accusation against Aaron is innaccurate...

...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...

...One cannot get remuneration, votes, or even a pat on the back from the language...

...But since Miller and Swift are against such legislation, could this happen...

...What emotions had reduced them to tears...

...the workman who collects garbage will smell no sweeter even if it becomes compulsory to call him Philosopher King...

...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...

...And not even rabbits could produce parthenogenetically a litter between a main and a subordinate clause...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...They do not tell us, however, how and by whom these investigations were conducted...

...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...

...There are two further problems with Miller and Swift's position...

...The real point was that Marx was a Darwinist...

...Miller and Swift then refer to "several recent systematic investigations of how people of both sexes use and understand personal pronouns...

...You have to be pretty monomaniacal and tone-deaf to ignore the ugliness of repairer and of the erer in launderer...

...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...

...I was much encouraged by the upbeat tone the interview had taken and I thought it an appropriate time to depart...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...Sorry, no charging...

...And, with that, he did indeed begin to weep, taking several minutes to regain his composure...

...These two unfortunate gentlemen are accused of conspiring to violate the civil rights of the Weathermen some years ago, and the trial has...

...even Saint Joan is no longer to be known as a heroine but as a hero...

...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...

...AND GEESE ARE GETTING FAT-BUT, DON'T PUT A PENNY IN THE OLD MAN'S HAT-Instead Give a Christmas gift of a year's membership in Robertson's Recipes of the Month Club...

...Unless perhaps an Act of Parliament, or some other such legislation, mandates (or, more properly, womandates) one of these pronouns into law...

...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...

...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...

...and as far over the horizon as your imagination wants to reach, add up your pennies to only $16.40...

...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...

...Gee," I was forced to admit, "I never realized that Darwin was a Marxist...

...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...

...Well, I could go out into the street right now to do a little questioning of my own and find contrary evidence aplenty...

...Add $2.00 for outside United States and Possessions...

...Gone, all gone...

...But I did not see this written anywhere, at least in the first week of fighting...

...but alumnae, with its feminine ending, is a must to women who would feel discriminated against if subsumed under alumm...

...Poor girl--or woman: The Inquisition forced feminine clothing on her thus exposing her to the lust of her jailers...

...Washington, D.C...

...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...

...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...

...That is the key difference...

...In a cogent introductory statement," our authors report, "the publishers explain the purpose of the innovation and the reasons for their selection of hir...

...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...

...I can envision a time when someone casually saying "na duty" Robertson's Recipes of the Month, Inc...

...Anger...

...John Simon is the author, most recently, of Paradigms Lost...

...Inconsistency is everywhere...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...Wrong...

...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...

...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 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...

...As a result, Khomeini's explicit attempt to destroy the current (Sunni) regime in Baghdad got lost in the verbiage...

...A sense of injustice...

...What Miller and Swirl conveniently overlook is the price we have paid for losing our second-person-singular pronominal form...

...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...

...After that, although her family and close friends may go on calling her a girl with impunity, most redblooded women find the term offensive...

...Still, you might interject, where is the danger in making a few footling concessions if the result is peace in the republic...

...Now, I ask you, who shall prevail...

...That certainly places things in a new light...

...This was no accident, no mere coincidence...

...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...

...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...

...Although Miller and Swift are perfectly satisfied with the singular they, another solution also holds evident appeal for them...

...if by committed feminists, the results would most likely reflect what the investigators set out to prove...

...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...

...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...

...as well as ha, from a novel by June Arnold, and person or per, from a book by Marge Piercy...

...It is hard to resist the conclusion that feminists either hate their feminity or smart under their lack of feminine comeliness--unhealthy situations both...

...The Washington Post investigated, found that Zumwalt was wrong, and printed a news story about it, right...

...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...

...From "myriad suggestions," they adduce co, E, tey, and besh...

...That's not the point at all...

...After all these years, we're finally on the right track," he resumed, "and this time we're not about to fail...

...He used to be a Democrat, you know, and that's why he believed in evolution...

...One is self-contradiction and consequent wishy-washiness...

...Schanche produced a pure thumb-sucker from Cairo, an interview with "a Western scholar who has lived in both Iran and Iraq...

...CHRISTMAS IS COMING...

...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...

...Got it...

...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...

...Evolution is not a Communist plot...

...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...

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...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...

...Typical human reasoning," Muggs said impatiently...

...The feminine ending -ess is not acceptable to women who, it seems, must be called actors and sculptors, not actresses and sculptresses...

...Superseded, perhaps, by a consensus of broads...

...But then I pointed out to him that On the Origin of Species and the first volume of Capital were both published in 1859...

...Miller and Swirl first define their attitude thus: "A person may appropriately be called 'a girl' until her middle or late teens...

...They cite at length and with palpable approbation recent attempts to coin "a new sex-inclusive singular pronoun...

...20002 when the feminists deem it so...

...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...

...Shame on you, Frank Reynolds...

...Humiliation...

...Take, for example, the war on the masculine pronoun in its all-encompassing sense...

...Consider now a simple sentence, say, "Everyone must do his duty," which could become, "Everyone must do co [or E, tey, hesh] duty...

...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...

...Or it could become "everyone must do na [or person, per, than, /sir] duty...

...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...

...Laundress is presumably unacceptable because of the feminine ending...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...205) 967-4582 Enclosed...

...Just a denial from Aaron's colleagues and friends...

...tively long chapter on "The Pronoun Problem...

...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...

...The reason is political...

...Take the question of girl versus woman...

...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...

...Take the case of feminist English and its demands from, and depredations on, Standard English...

...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...

...between the Ottoman and Persian Empires, and even on the seventhcentury division between Sunni and Shi'ite Islam...

...I shall address my remarks chiefly to this...

...No news story at all...

...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...