Daily Archives: August 11, 2009

Insane Quote of the Day

Posted by on August 11, 2009 12 comments

Feminists are trying to dictate to the rest of us what the masculine pronoun is allowed to mean. For me it means the same thing it meant to Milton, Shakespeare, Jane Austin[sic], Flannery O’Connor[,] and C. S. Lewis. Feminists want us to pretend they all meant to exclude women from practically everything but that is ridiculous. And they demand that we pretend that the traditional use of “man” for humankind MEANS males only. But it doesn’t and pretty much everybody knows it.

So you can demand that the meaning of words be changed. That does not mean the meanings will change. I suggest that you will find only pro-feminists (and people who haven’t thought much about it but are trying to be nice and agreeable) agreeing with you, which proves my point. It is not about communication, but ideology.

Of course the first thing to say about this is that the conflict is not about meaning, but about literary ethics. Sure we all know that folks mean humanity when they say mankind, but the question is why we should prefer to gender our gender-inclusive terms in the first place. What reason would justify talking about men and women in purely masculine terms? That is the question. Obviously.

How sadly hilarious the kind of thinking in this quote really is! What’s insidious about it is the way that it equates anything challenging the status quo with ideology: using masculine language to describe the human race as a whole is the norm; any challenge to that is ideological feminist totalitarianism.

Are we really fools enough to think that masculine-centric linguistic conventions are simply benign? What masquerades as a condemnation of “ideology” actually turns out to be an exercise of pure ideology itself. Certain contingent linguistic norms are enshrined as necessary, natural, and unquestionable. This is anything but the rejection of some new ideology. Rather it is merely the blind act of perpetuating an old one.

Real Theology

Posted by on August 11, 2009 11 comments

Thanks to Melissa, I came across a series of incredibly moving reflections yesterday from a couple who are pregnant with a child, Ethan, who has a fatal birth defect. Amidst all the vitriolic rhetoric and ideological warfare that takes place between “pro-choice” and “pro-life” movements in America, this intensely personal story is really a true witness to the nature of Christ’s peace. This is a true example of what embracing the way of Christ’s hospitality looks like. It is at once a testimony to the cost and the joy that attends a life given over to that hospitality. May Eric and Dayna be blessed, sustained, and kept through this time.

Here is just one snippet of Dayna’s poignant reflections:

The idea that God’s providence or purposes are somehow at work behind tragedies like Ethan’s death is appealing to many people. I think this might be because, in our moments of powerlessness, this thought reassures us that God is in complete control, even if we cannot comprehend what God is doing in our lives. But I’m not sure it’s an honest conclusion. Surely God is at work in our world and in our lives, and surely the promise of the resurrection is that one day the power of death will be completely swallowed up by the God who is the source of all life. But the moment in which we live is somewhere between the promise and its fulfillment. The moment in which we live requires both stark honesty about the realities of our broken world and radical faith in the coming vision of wholeness that God has promised. The moment in which we live requires us to acknowledge that there is much that remains terribly broken about our world, even as we wait in faith for the day when all will be made whole. . . .

I know that if I am open and listen, there are things I will learn through this experience. I know that the heart-rending experience of loving and losing Ethan will shape me in life-changing ways. At the very least, going through this dark valley has the potential to make me a more wise and compassionate pastor and friend. But I don’t believe for a minute that God caused this to happen or that this was in God’s plan for Ethan’s life. I don’t believe God wills babies to be born with birth defects any more so than God wills tsunamis or genocides or mass starvation. I believe God hovers like a heartbroken mother, tending to a dying child, among the wreckage of our world. I believe God longs with a longing far more intense than what I feel for Ethan, for the healing and wholeness of all the broken and dying life in our world. I believe God is actively fighting against the powers of death and destruction in our world, and will continue to fight against them until the day that they are no more. And I believe that God is grieving with us as we wait for that day when all of creation will be completely freed from the strangle-hold of death.

On Gender-Accurate Language

Posted by on August 11, 2009 13 comments

There’s a pretty interesting article in the Times about the “controversy” over gender-accurate language (scare quotes are because there isn’t really a controversy, just a handful of very irrational and vocal people that think masculinity is the ultimate definition of the human).

Anyways, it turns out that the use of masculine pronouns as a stand-in for humanity in general is not an ancient phenomenon—at least not in the English language:

Traditionalists, of course, find nothing wrong with using he to refer to an anybody or an everybody, male or female. After all, hasn’t he been used for both sexes since time immemorial? Well, no, as a matter of fact, it hasn’t. It’s a relatively recent usage, as these things go. And it wasn’t cooked up by a male sexist grammarian, either.

If any single person is responsible for this male-centric usage, it’s Anne Fisher, an 18th-century British schoolmistress and the first woman to write an English grammar book, according to the sociohistorical linguist Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade. Fisher’s popular guide, “A New Grammar” (1745), ran to more than 30 editions, making it one of the most successful grammars of its time. More important, it’s believed to be the first to say that the pronoun he should apply to both sexes.

The idea that he, him and his should go both ways caught on and was widely adopted. But how, you might ask, did people refer to an anybody before then? This will surprise a few purists, but for centuries the universal pronoun was they. Writers as far back as Chaucer used it for singular and plural, masculine and feminine. Nobody seemed to mind that they, them and their were officially plural. As Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage explains, writers were comfortable using they with an indefinite pronoun like everybody because it suggested a sexless plural.

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