From: smith@ctron.com (Larry Smith)
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp,rec.games.frp.misc
Subject: Re: QUESTION: Looking for "women's" rpg.
Date: 11 Sep 92 13:59:59 GMT
Reply-To: smith@ctron.com
Followup-To: rec.games.frp
Organization: Cabletron Systems, Inc.

In article <1992Sep10.150400.9984@nntp.uoregon.edu>, rugi@cie.uoregon.edu (Russ Gilman) writes:

>....  But by telling women/womyn
>that they cannot get some form of satisfaction by defining their language,
>you are telling them that they are not part of the culture that shapes the
>language- you are denying them that right.  They are trying to find a place for
>women/womyn with less of an emphasis on the "men".

Russ, a subset of people in a given culture don't have a "right" to "shape"
the language used to talk about them.  Blacks/AfroAmericans/AfricanAmericans
have gotten away with it, but only because a plurality of all the people in
the culture are willing to let them do so, mostly for their own reasons.  That
may or may _not_ be true of women.

In general, language is defined by its use.  If the majority of the population
decides the word "womyn" means the female of the human species, then it does,
modulo a certain amount of cultural inertia due to being a literate (albeit
just barely) society.  Until that change is acknowledged where it counts -
on the English tests of the country's school system - then anyone who wishes
to stick to "women" also has a perfect right to ignore attempts by a minority
to manipulate their thinking by manipulating their language.

Frankly, I think "womyn" has a snowball's chance in hell of becoming a standard.
Not only is it laughable on the face of it, it also presumes from the false
assumption that "woman" is somehow derived from a masculine root "man".  Since
"wo" does not appear as a prefix on any other English word I can think of, that
idea is wrong from the start, and since centuries of standard usage have, in
fact, seriously eroded the masculine implications of the generic "man", that
it could probably be argued that we are standing in more need of a new
male-specific generic rather than changing a perfectly acceptable female-
specific one to a different female-specific one.  But PC has never been good
at logic or at cost-effectiveness.

>Wrong!  I resent that, and I'm a male.  Women resent it because there's 
>no general possibility (for someone not as enlightened as yourself) for
>a "neutral" noun for an unknown person.  I resent it because by making
>the male pronoun "he" stand-in for a neutral noun "it" or "them" you take
>the masculinity from the "he".  In other words, if the "he" is neutral,
>what is the masculine pronoun?  

"He" serves for both, thanks.  If you don't like it, I'd suggest setting up a
convention of the nation's English teachers and getting a buy-in on a gender
neutral pronoun they won't mark wrong on student essays.  Then, maybe, you
might have a case.  I'm sorry, but correct English is a consensus thing, and
no amount of shrill protest by a minority will change that. "African Americans"
would still be "darkies" if "colored", "negro", "Afro-American", "black" or
"African American" where still being marked wrong on tests.

Larry Smith (smith@ctron.com)  No, I don't speak for Cabletron.  Need you ask?
-
How about we all do something reasonable?  I bet that'll confuse 'em!
Xref: sparky rec.games.frp:25104 rec.games.frp.misc:5111 alt.feminism:772