Let Us Not Allow Political Correctness Destroy Language

Over time I have had to accept living with the anathema of one of the most prevalent and deliberate violation of grammar rules; the use of plural pronouns instead of singular one in the name of seeking gender equality! Who said the use of he is exclusively male? Mankind, does this exclude the very existence of women?

Descriptivists will argue that he isn’t gender neutral, as if that is not enough they will also tell you that having to write he/she or s/he is cumbersome. Perhaps if English was like French we would not have to deal with such quagmires in language. The purity of the French language is the responsibility of L’Academie Française; English lacks such an authority! English like Wikipedia takes anything from anyone! Like Gelernter I’ll ask, “can we afford to allow virtual feminists to elbow our way like noisy drunks into that inner mental circles where all your faculties(such as they are) are labouring to produce decent prose(or speech for that matter!)? I am not against feminism in any way, I don’t understand why they say they are fighting for gender equality. This sounds like a paradox! Aren’t they trying to fight a virtual misogyny? One that they have created for themselves to such an extent that they have changed feminism into some form of misandry! L  (Let’s not deviate from language, reserve this debate for another page)

“The feminist movement as we have come to know it in recent decades is fundamentally a "con."...As it is considered treasonous to criticise a sister feminist, no standards of accuracy or honesty are ever enforced. Hyperbole and deceit thus become the formula for success, "peer review" playing no role in reining in misinformation. Any would-be feminist who raises scholarly objections to the rampant misinformation is branded an 'enemy of women' and is drummed out of the movement.” ― Robert Sheaffer

Back to matters of the heart, language. Since time immemorial, he has been known to represent male and female genders just like man has been used to refer to all human being, irrespective of their sex. Mankind does not assume that women do not exist! Come to think of a phrase like “man breastfeeds his young.” Biologically man refers to all the members of the species Homo sapiens. Out of biology, “Every man for himself, god for us all,” so what about women? Don’t create a fuss about it, they are covered. I can bet if one is a feminist and does not believe in god then he/she must be baying for my blood after seeing that phrase (he/she? Yes, you can be a member of the male sex and a feminist). But then there’s a funny trend by feminists where we’ll only hear them battle for chairperson instead of chairman(which does not prescribe that it has to be a male) and don’t want to recognize that words like conman or manhole may be demeaning to members of the male sex. If you are really fighting for equality it’s only fair that you recognize even what may demean your counterparts!

Pronouns he, she, his, her, they, their; in no way can they be used to refer to a singular. Consider a sentence like “everyone has their rights” given that everyone is singular, this construction is not grammatically correct! When we are told to be our brother’s keeper, does it imply that we should let our sisters to the hounds? It is so ridiculous that we’ve seen feminists suggest herstory instead of history! The epitome of this dispute is as seen in Pauwels (Women Changing Language) work where feminists have tried to re-spell the word woman by removing the man part and giving bizarre suggestions like womyn, wommin and wommon. At this point I feel tickled, someone give these people morphology classes! As if that is not enough they go ahead and change the stress pattern of a word like chairman to make sure stress does not fall on –man. As a result they have [tʃɛər ′mæn] instead of [′tʃɛərmən]. I thought feminism was about equality and not man hating!

 “Professors often advise every student to buy their own book” to whom does they refer to here? Is it that professors want students to buy books they have written or are they asking that each student has his/her own book? Why don’t you just spare your audience this kind of ambiguity by following a simple rule of grammar? If indeed we are looking for a gender neutral pronoun, one that will clearly include both genders indiscriminately using plural ones as singular is not the solution. In fact, English has a gender neutral pronoun it! As such saying that we are looking for gender neutral language is misleading. Unfortunately that cannot be a solution, it is used to refer to inanimate objects and animals; not human beings.  Scholars have further argued that the unknown gender (neutral) is not the same as the aspect of being either masculine or feminine. Let us not allow political correctness pollute the aesthetic beauty of language. 

For a solution, if you won’t accept he to represent all genders, then try avoiding constructions that require pronouns where you can. Try using one and oneself where possible but in no way should you go the wrong route of “pluralizing”. Otherwise when I tell you to list the great men in Kenya’s history be sure to have Wangari Mathai as the first one on that list, if I say I am my brother’s keeper I don’t mean that I don’t care about my sister. I don’t think I need explain what I mean by “man has a gestation period of nine months.” All in all, apart from wrongly painting men as villains and women the victims, feminism has raped the English language!

                     Let us not allow political correctness pollute the aesthetic beauty of language