![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lprovenI am currently, urged on by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
uon, working my way through Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. I'm finding it somewhat hard work; it is bursting with ideas and insights, but Hofstadter's ideas of wordplay and humour seem, to me, very laboured, and he demands a considerable amount of labour from his readers to drum home some fairly simple points (as it seems to me), and then frequently vaults over lofty intellectual hurdles in a passing paragraph. I have to work repeatedly through whole chapters sometimes to get his drift, to discover something I already knew, then find myself repeatedly studying a concluding half-page repeatedly to comb out from it its several implications. Frustrating, but worthwhile; I am learning and being made to think in new ways, and this is always a good thing.
But Hofstadter is a frustrating writer, to me; in some ways, I really like his style - he is light-hearted, a playful genius (if that is the word), who feels that thinking is fun and complex ideas can and should be funny. He has piercing insights, but by the gods, sometimes, he lays it on with a trowel, nay, a spade, to make his point.
But that's what it needs, sometimes.
This essay is a good case in point. He forces us to face up to the inherent sexism that pervades English by making a shocking metaphor, and belabours you around the head with it 'til your skull rings.
Which is exactly the point.
Good stuff. Go read.
Which has made me think... For some years now, I've been trying to change how I speak and write. One aspect of this is becoming someone who writes for a living, sometimes. Knowing that lots of people will read your words makes you choose them with greater care, I find. And I'm not a fiction writer, nor have any designs so to be, so I don't have to fret over authenticity in dialogue or speech.
But I do have to fret over some things, and sexism is one of them. I strive to avoid sexist pronouns; I don't find it offensive - though after reading the above piece, maybe I should! - but I do think it's lax and ill-mannered. However, I do hate unnecessary neologisms. I encountered a lot of these when I briefly read news:alt.polyamory for a while (i.e., here). Alt.poly talks a lot about sex and love and gender, and careful choice of language is necessary. But they're mostly American, and the preferred gender-neutral pronoun seems to be the novel "zie" or "vie": if somene doesn't want to specify the gender of the person zie is talking about, zie uses the word "zie" instead of "he" or "she". There are posessive forms, too.
I hate this. It jars horribly. To me, it's redolent of lousy 1970s SF about neuter humans and so on. All right, so you can't use "it"; "it" connotes non-sentience.
But there are work-arounds. For me, "they" is a perfectly acceptable gender-neutral singular pronoun. Example: "when the driver gets into their car, they must fasten their seatbelt before moving off." Sounds fine to me. But I have been told, loud and long, that using a plural pronoun with verbs conjugated for the singular jars for some people as badly as "zie" does for me. Funny, then, that they have no problem with "you". "You" is the second-person plural. I know, "thee" and "thou" is obsolete and archaic, but most English speakers still have a vague idea how to use it. Try it for thyself; canst thou not recall the correct forms to use, if thou wouldst speak like this? Dost thou follow this without difficulty? Sure, it sounds silly, Shakespearian, but it's perfectly comprehensible, isn't it? I would not use it if I were speaking to thee face to face, except to make a point, but it's not a problem.
So, following a long discussion on chat about this with someone I encountered online, I have started to favour "one". It has faint overtones of royalty: one sounds like one is the Queen when one starts referring to persons as one, one finds.
But it doesn't have to be. You can get away with it. "As the driver of a car, one must fasten the seatbelt before moving off."
What do folks prefer? "He or she", spelled out in full? "S/he"? "They"? "Zie"? Do you notice this sort of thing?
uon, working my way through Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. I'm finding it somewhat hard work; it is bursting with ideas and insights, but Hofstadter's ideas of wordplay and humour seem, to me, very laboured, and he demands a considerable amount of labour from his readers to drum home some fairly simple points (as it seems to me), and then frequently vaults over lofty intellectual hurdles in a passing paragraph. I have to work repeatedly through whole chapters sometimes to get his drift, to discover something I already knew, then find myself repeatedly studying a concluding half-page repeatedly to comb out from it its several implications. Frustrating, but worthwhile; I am learning and being made to think in new ways, and this is always a good thing.But Hofstadter is a frustrating writer, to me; in some ways, I really like his style - he is light-hearted, a playful genius (if that is the word), who feels that thinking is fun and complex ideas can and should be funny. He has piercing insights, but by the gods, sometimes, he lays it on with a trowel, nay, a spade, to make his point.
But that's what it needs, sometimes.
This essay is a good case in point. He forces us to face up to the inherent sexism that pervades English by making a shocking metaphor, and belabours you around the head with it 'til your skull rings.
Which is exactly the point.
Good stuff. Go read.
Which has made me think... For some years now, I've been trying to change how I speak and write. One aspect of this is becoming someone who writes for a living, sometimes. Knowing that lots of people will read your words makes you choose them with greater care, I find. And I'm not a fiction writer, nor have any designs so to be, so I don't have to fret over authenticity in dialogue or speech.
But I do have to fret over some things, and sexism is one of them. I strive to avoid sexist pronouns; I don't find it offensive - though after reading the above piece, maybe I should! - but I do think it's lax and ill-mannered. However, I do hate unnecessary neologisms. I encountered a lot of these when I briefly read news:alt.polyamory for a while (i.e., here). Alt.poly talks a lot about sex and love and gender, and careful choice of language is necessary. But they're mostly American, and the preferred gender-neutral pronoun seems to be the novel "zie" or "vie": if somene doesn't want to specify the gender of the person zie is talking about, zie uses the word "zie" instead of "he" or "she". There are posessive forms, too.
I hate this. It jars horribly. To me, it's redolent of lousy 1970s SF about neuter humans and so on. All right, so you can't use "it"; "it" connotes non-sentience.
But there are work-arounds. For me, "they" is a perfectly acceptable gender-neutral singular pronoun. Example: "when the driver gets into their car, they must fasten their seatbelt before moving off." Sounds fine to me. But I have been told, loud and long, that using a plural pronoun with verbs conjugated for the singular jars for some people as badly as "zie" does for me. Funny, then, that they have no problem with "you". "You" is the second-person plural. I know, "thee" and "thou" is obsolete and archaic, but most English speakers still have a vague idea how to use it. Try it for thyself; canst thou not recall the correct forms to use, if thou wouldst speak like this? Dost thou follow this without difficulty? Sure, it sounds silly, Shakespearian, but it's perfectly comprehensible, isn't it? I would not use it if I were speaking to thee face to face, except to make a point, but it's not a problem.
So, following a long discussion on chat about this with someone I encountered online, I have started to favour "one". It has faint overtones of royalty: one sounds like one is the Queen when one starts referring to persons as one, one finds.
But it doesn't have to be. You can get away with it. "As the driver of a car, one must fasten the seatbelt before moving off."
What do folks prefer? "He or she", spelled out in full? "S/he"? "They"? "Zie"? Do you notice this sort of thing?
