Feminism and the English Language

...If we mean to put things right, we can’t wait much longer...

...When an Anglican priest mounts the pulpit, they are about to address the congregation...

...When students have been ordered since fi rst grade to put “he or she” in spots where “he” would mean exactly the same thing, and “fi refi ghter” where “fi reman” would mean exactly the same thing...

...Such complaints never did rank high on the average American’s list of worries...

...In feminist minds ideology excused the lie, and the goal of interchangeable sexes was a far greater good than decent English...

...In fact the New English was deliberately created and pounded into children’s heads by an intellectual elite asserting its control over American culture...

...Children also fi nd it odd that “enough” should be spelled that way, that New York should be at the same latitude as Spain, that 7 squared is 49, and so on...

...Who can afford to allow a virtual feminist to elbow her way like a noisy drunk into that inner mental circle where all your faculties (such as they are) are laboring to produce decent prose...

...Occasionally one sees “s/he,” which shows not indifference but outright contempt for the language and the reader...

...Our language used to belong to all its speakers and readers and writers...

...He/she is about to address the congregation” is unacceptable because it’s not clear how to pronounce it: “he she,” “he or she,” “he slash she...

...But there is no such thing as a neutral “she...

...A reader who had thought the topic was drivers is now faced by a specifi cally female driver, and naturally wonders why...

...Our ability to write and read good, clear English connects us to one another and to our common past...

...How can I (how can any teacher) get students to take the prime rule seriously when virtually the whole educational establishment teaches the opposite...

...BY DAVID GELERNTER How can I teach my students to write decently when the English language has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Academic-Industrial Complex...

...Thou art the thing itself...

...even feminists don’t claim there is...

...Why should I worry about anyone’s ideology...

...I still remember the fi rst time I encountered such a sentence, in an early-1980s book by a noted historian about a Jesuit in Asia...

...The use of he as a pronoun for nouns embracing both genders is a simple, practical convention rooted in the beginnings of the English language...

...But “the driver turns on her headlights” is a sentence about a female driver...

...And what should we say instead of “brotherhood...

...We have accepted, implicitly, a hit-and-run vandalizing of English—the richest, most expressive language in the world...

...They hate such words as actress and waitress...

...Civilization copes poorly with ideas that have no names...

...great human being” is a casual tribute to a friend—that it’s hard to know where to turn...

...Show of hands...

...But we used to expect every educated citizen to write decently—and that goal is out the window...

...The same feminist warriors who would never write “he” where “he or she” will do would also never write “the author or authoress” where “the author” will do...

...Wittgenstein was a great heart” (also true) can’t be rephrased in hero-speak, and can’t substitute for “great man” either...

...Just as any competent reader listens to what he is reading, he pictures it too (if it can be pictured...

...In the third edition (1979), White lays down the law on the heorshe epidemic that was sweeping the country like a bad fl u (or a bad joke...

...Sometimes a writer can avoid plastering his prose with feminist bumper-stickers and still not provoke the running dogs of the Establishment by diving into the plural whenever danger threatens...

...But our problem goes deeper than a few silly words and many tedious sentences...

...The word was unquestionably biased to begin with (the dominant male), but after hundreds of years it has become seemingly indispensable...

...But English used to be a language of the people, by the people, for the people...

...The alternatives are so bad—“great person” sounds silly...

...Nowadays students are taught to admire celebrities and money instead...

...He-or-she’ing added so much ugly dead weight to the language that even the Establishment couldn’t help noticing...

...What happens to a nation’s thinking when you ban such phrases as “great men...

...True, “he” sounds explicitly masculine in a way “priest” doesn’t, to those who are just learning the language...

...Yet such sentences skreak like fi ngernails on a blackboard...

...We happen to know also that the idea of “great men” has been bounced right out of education at every level...

...To distract your reader for political purposes, to trip him up merely to demonstrate your praiseworthy right-thinkingness, is a low trick...

...But the implications of our spineless surrender go deeper...

...Logic has never been a strong suit among the commissarintellectuals who have bossed American culture since the 1970s...

...Here is the problem with the dreaded she-sentence...

...He or she” is the proud marshal of this pathetic parade...

...You would never fi nd my feminist colleagues writing a phrase such as, “When an Anglican priest or priestess mounts the pulpit . . . ” You will fi nd them writing, “When an Anglican priest mounts the pulpit, he or she is about to address the congregation...

...He told Roger Angell [his wife’s son by a previous marriage] that he was “surprised, but not downhearted, that the piece got sunk...

...But “he” transforming itself into “he or she” is like a ball rolling uphill...

...The depressing trail continues one last mile...

...In his 1984 White biography, Scott Elledge tells a remarkable story about “he or she”: The New Yorker rejected [in 1971] a parable White had written about the campaign of feminists to abolish the use of the pronoun his to mean “his or her...

...They know that Americans of the late 1960s were not struck en masse by sudden unhappiness over the neutral he or the word “chairman...

...Crown thy good with siblinghood...

...Do we have the courage to rebuild...

...We have allowed our academic overlords to plow up White’s cow-path and replace it with a steel-and-concrete highway, hemmed in by guardrails and heavily patrolled by police...

...Languages such as French are shaped and guided by offi cial boards of big shots...

...They may be ignorant but they’re not stupid...

...Can one desire too much of a good thing...

...Was the author demonstrating her inability to write proper English...

...Words like “authoress” would almost certainly have disappeared with no help from feminists...

...Ideologues can lie themselves blue in the face without changing the fact that, to those who know modern English as it existed until the cultural revolution and still does exist in many quarters, the neutral he “has lost all suggestion of maleness...

...So let’s consider “he or she...

...it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs...

...Or merely letting us know that there is no such thing as a female writer...

...White was our greatest modern source of the purest, freshest, clearest, most bracing English, straight from a magic spring that bubbled for him alone...

...In consequence we have all got used to sentences where puffed-up words like “chairperson” and “humankind” strut and preen, where he-or-she’s keep bashing into surrounding phrases like bumper cars and related deformities blossom like blisters...

...victory—that every story writer imagines himself inside his characters...

...Slashes are just as bad...

...The fi xed idea forced by language rapists upon a whole generation of students, that “he” can refer only to a male, is (in short) wrong...

...The young Jane Austen is praised by her descendants for having written “pure simple English...

...It doesn’t happen unless someone has volunteered to push...

...Meanwhile, in everyday prose, a word with useless syllables or a sentence with useless words is a house fancied-up with fake dormers and chimneys...

...What is the writer getting at...

...The same conclusion follows independently from a language’s well-established tendency to simplify and compress its existing structure (like a settling seabed) to make room for constantly arriving new coinages...

...The well-aimed torpedo of Feminist English has sunk the whole process of teaching students to write...

...Unsatisfi ed with having rammed their 80-ton 16wheeler into the nimble sports-car of English style, they proceeded to shoot the legs out from under grammar— which collapsed in a heap after agreement between subject and pronoun was declared to be optional...

...We allowed ideologues to wreck the English language...

...they are all markers of an epoch-making victory of propaganda over common sense...

...How many of today’s high school English teachers would mark this sentence wrong, or even “awkward...

...We might well have misplaced the “great man” idea anyway, but losing the phrase didn’t help...

...White’s comment: “If you think she is a handy substitute for he, try it and see what happens...

...Our one consolation is that the country is fi lling up gradually with people who have been reared on ugly, childish writing and will never expect anything else...

...Way back in the 1970s, “chairperson” was in fact a one-word joke: an object lesson in the ludicrous places you would reach if you took Feminist English seriously...

...He has lost all suggestion of maleness in these circumstances...

...At the bottom of this junkpile is a maneuver that seems to be growing in popularity, at least among college students: writing “she” instead of neutral “he,” or interchanging “he” and “she” at random...

...Tolerance” is no substitute for “brotherhood...

...A feminist might say that he-or-she is merely the latest twist in our everchanging cowpath...

...To be deaf to English is like being deaf to birdsong or laughter or rustling trees or babbling brooks—only worse, because English is the communal, emotional, and intellectual net that holds this nation together, if anything can...

...The Elements of Style, White’s revision of a short textbook by his Cornell professor William Strunk, is justly revered as the best thing of its kind...

...In some cases the awfulness of a feminist phrase requires several paragraphs to investigate systematically...

...a later edition of Elements published after his death is a disgrace to his memory...

...Writing is a tricky business that requires one’s whole concentration, as any professional will tell you...

...This grotesque outcome follows naturally from the primordial lie...

...It is ugly and boring and cheap, and impossible to take seriously...

...Liebling and Joseph Mitchell, he was one of a triumvirate that made the New Yorker under its great editor Harold Ross a thing of beauty and a joy forever...

...Yes and yes...

...For the New Yorker to have rejected a piece by White, its darling and its hero, the man who did more than anyone but Ross himself to make the magazine the runaway, roaring success it became, and (by the way) a thoroughgoing liberal, was a sure sign that feminism had already got America in a chokehold...

...The living language is like a cowpath,” wrote White...

...But this too is a lie, and in fairness to my opponents I have never heard them deploy it...

...Shakespeare’s most perfect phrases are miraculously simple and terse...

...The unclarity is a nuisance, and each possibility sounds awful...

...it is never incorrect...

...But the real problem goes deeper...

...When the style-smashers fi rst announced, decades ago, that the neutral “he” meant “male” and excluded “female,” they were lying and knew it...

...And it gets worse...

...White’s comment: Alternatively, put all controversial nouns in the plural and avoid the choice of sex altogether, and you may fi nd your prose sounding general and diffuse as a result...

...Such investigations are worth pursuing nonetheless...

...Why should I worry about feminist ideology while I write...

...It has no pejorative connotations...

...E.B...

...So feminist authorities went back to the drawing board...

...our language is at stake...

...Not one...

...as no doubt you know anyway...

...Today, as college students and full-fl edged young English teachers emerge from the feminist incubator in which they have spent their whole lives, this victory of brainless ideology is on the brink of becoming institutionalized...

...After all, when a critic like Mary Lascelles writes (in her classic 1939 study of Jane Austen) that “no reader can vouch for more than his own experience,” one can hardly accuse her of envisioning male readers only...

...Brotherhood” has accordingly been quietly stricken from the list of good things to which Americans should aspire...

...Drivers turn on their headlights...

...A plague o’ both your houses...

...We have allowed ideologues to pocket a priceless property and walk away with it...

...Wittgenstein was a great man” is a self-suffi cient assertion, but “Wittgenstein was a hero” is not...

...The prime rule of writing is to keep it simple, concrete, concise...

...Of course all languages change...

...Was he a war hero, a philosophical hero...

...Warning: White died in 1985...

...Throw the bum out...

...Bargaining over the next word, shaping each phrase, netting and vetting the countless images that drift through the mind like butterfl ies in a summer garden, mounting some and releasing others—and keeping the trajectory and target always in mind...

...that he-or-she was the will of the people...

...Even today’s English professors have heard (I suppose) of Eudora Welty, who wrote in her 1984 memoirs—just as the feminist anti-English campaign was nearing total David Gelernter, a national fellow of the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is a professor of computer science at Yale...

...hearing and imagining the written word are ingrained habits...

...If you make students believe that “he” can refer only to a male, then writers who use “he” in sentences referring to men and women are actually discussing males only and excluding females—and might just as well use “she” and exclude males, leaving the reader to sort things out for himself...

...But in the 1970s and ’80s, arrogant ideologues began recasting English into heavy artillery to defend the borders of the New Feminist state...

...The small minority of born writers will always get by, inventing their own rules as they go...

...With A.J...

...Writing English is like writing music: One lays down the footprints of sounds that are recreated in each reader’s mind...

...It has generated a cascading series of problems in which the Establishment, having noticed that Offi - cially Approved gender-neutral sentences sound rotten, has dreamt up alternatives that are even worse...

...The she-sentences that result tend to slam on a reader’s brakes and send him smash-and-spinning into the roadside underbrush, cursing under his breath...

...in these cases they insist that the masculine form be used for men and women...

...To me, any woman’s (or man’s) attempt to remove the gender from the language is both funny and futile...

...it is his fi rst step, and his last too...

...It’s a disgrace that we graduate class after class of young Americans who will never be able to write down their thoughts effectively—in a business report, a letter of application or recommendation, a postcard or email, or any other form...

...it is about a driving person...

...Hero” doesn’t work...

...It is applied with nonsensical inconsistency, too...

...it’s passive and bland where “brotherhood” is active and inspiring...

...Education was invented to set people straight on all these fi ne points...

...How can we then tell them, “Make every word, every syllable count...

...The driver turns on his headlights” is not about a male or female person...