Monday, September 15, 2003

POLITICALLY CORRECT LINGUISTS

An excellent article here. Some excerpts:

THE PERSECUTION OF SCHOLARS for gender bias, on even the flimsiest evidence, has long been a fact of life in academe. Should one professor write, "Mary entered the kitchen," another boils over with feminist indignation, convenes a panel to investigate, and soon the whole campus is sucked into a tedious speakathon on the evils of sexism...

Along these lines, in 1992, the Linguist Society of America began urging scholars to use androgynous names when writing example sentences. The aim, set in the Linguist Society of America Guideline for Nonsexist Usage, was to get linguists to forgo stereotypes and to "avoid peopling . . . sentences with just one sex"...

Sometimes the efforts to ward off stereotypes become just nonsensical, as when the authors complain that men appear too often with cars and that they are always the ones fixing them. "No females fix cars in any of the ten textbooks, while 53 males do so." According to the Department of Labor, this is not only true of language textbooks: Less than two percent of automobile mechanics are women...

WRITING IN THE Spring 2003 issue of Language, Paul Postal of New York University questions every possible rationale for the LSA's policy ... Postal attacks the LSA policy for its exclusive focus on one type of offense. "There are many possible sources of offense, for example, those involving personal hygiene or dress habits (both potentially relevant to LSA meetings). Military organization and children's summer camps have codes about such matters. Should the LSA develop recommended lists of soaps and suggestions about how often to use them? Should shorts be banned or ties and brassieres required?"...

Almost as troubling to Postal is the threat to free speech represented by the guidelines on nonsexist language. He compares the policy to the law under which former French general Paul Aussaresses was prosecuted for "trying to justify war." The law and its supporters, writes Postal, are "incapable of distinguishing the content of views from the right to express them." But here's the good professor's jaw-breaking punch: "Underlying that incapacity is a dogmatic, total assurance of knowing exactly what things other people should be allowed to say. I believe the same impulse underlies the LSA guideline." ...

During the '90s, intellectual life on college campuses suffered profound harm from the advances of grievance-committee scholarship. Students who should have been arguing the relative merits of great literature and philosophy got caught up in late-night bull sessions about whether to call their female classmates womyn. Such victim-status politics has given scholarship a bad name and detracted from the higher pursuits that are supposed to the mission of higher education

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