Re: Hideous grammar

[chuck mccaffrey <cmccaffrey -at- SPYGLASS -dot- COM>]

In article <199508021323 -dot- IAA24495 -at- spock>, "Janet K. Christian"
<janetc -at- austin -dot- apple -dot- com> wrote:

> >From: chuck mccaffrey <cmccaffrey -at- SPYGLASS -dot- COM>
> >Subject:      Re: Hideous grammar
> >
> >I think that "they" as a gender-neutral alternative to "she" or "he" makes
> >perfect sense.

> Here! Here! In the 1800s and early 1900s, "he," "him," and "his" were
> perfectly acceptable gender-neutral pronouns. But then most people in
> business were male. That is no longer true, and these pronouns are now
> recognized for what they really are -- male pronouns -- they've never been
> gender-neutral.
 agreeist with me?  :-)

> The English language desperately needs a usable singular gender-neutral
> pronoun.

I agree.  Thanks!

> >
> >What's the plural of "Charles" as in the sentence, "I went to a party last
> >night and there were seven Charless (or Charleses or Charles's) there"?
> >The first isn't "correct" and it doesn't look right.  The second is
> >"correct" but it doesn't look right, either.  The third isn't "correct"
> >but it's close to correct and it looks subjectively better to some people
> >than the second. What's the problem?

> Because, unlike the false gender-neutral "he," the apostrophe *always*
> means a possessive or a contraction. Cleaning up pronouns is one thing, it
> does not change the meaning of the writing. However, using an apostrophe to
> indicate a plural obscures the meaning. Were I to read your sentence, my
> brain would immediately think "seven of what that belong to Charles?" I
> would simply rewrite the sentence to be "there were seven men named Charles
> there."

I disagree.  There is no confusion in the sentence that isn't imported to
the question by your prejudice in favor of the typographic convention of
adding apostrophe s ('s) to mean plural.  You cause the confusion because
of what you believe to be correct, but I don't think that the meaning of
the sentence is obscured in the least by the alternate convention.
Moreover, I suspect (though cannot prove) that most folks who add 's in
the case of words ending in and `s' (as in Charles) are doing so because,
to them, it makes more typographical sense than the very odd looking
"Charleses."  Note that I did not argue in favor of using apostrophe-s in
all cases to indicate a plural state, just this one.

> I deleted your argument/example that technical writers should be paid the
> same as technical programmers. I happen to believe we *should* be paid the
> same. Not only do we have to understand the technical concepts, even read
> the programming languages, about which we write, we also have to be able to
> explain these same concepts in clear, concise, understandable language so
> that others can also understand. To me, that's makes us doubly-skilled.
> Ever read a programmer's attempt at technical writing?

I made no such argument.  I projected a suspicion that some technical
writers hide behind the authority of their reference books (dictionaries,
_The Chicago Manual of Style_, other such things) because they are unsure
of themselves as writers and especially unsure of themselves as technical
writers.  Their insecurity leads them (so I suspect) to often mostly
worthless arguments -- such as the debate over Charleses and Charles's --
because they mistakenly believe that blind, vocal defense of their
"correctness" owing to their leaning on "authorities" gives them a sense
of importance and control in a situation -- usually a technical company of
some kind -- where they feel inferior because of their technological
illiteracy.  Grasping at this straw makes them (I suspect) feel better
about themselves and gives them a reason to argue that "word geeks are as
important and should be paid as much as technological geeks," to
spontificate about the "hideous grammar" that they found which
necessitates a post to this group to brag about their superiority over the
poor, illiterate programmer, writer of grafitti in a school restroom, etc.

I think that we should be paid as much as comparably skilled programmers,
too, but we aren't, and I suspect that we never will be.  If you want to
help organize a worldwide workers revolution that will lead to equitable
salaries, you may put me down for a donation of both time and money.
However, arguing that we are as important and therefore deserving of equal
salaries on the basis of pernickety devotion to arbitrary rules of
"correctness" isn't nearly as convincing as your secondary contention,
that we need to understand with reasonable skill and efficiency both the
code and the writing about the code.

As a Marxist, I believe that we should all be paid the same, too, but
that's an argument for a different day and place.  The problem, I think,
in the disparity between the salaries of programmers and tech writers is
the misperception both by management and by many if not most tech writers
and tech writer wannabees that anyone with a good liberal arts education
must therefore have good writing skills, that people with good writing
skills must therefore make good tech writers, and finally that tech
writers and tech writer wannabes are a dime a dozen because it's darned
hard for such liberal arts majors to find jobs as experts on the history
of Victorian England and American poets of the post_WWI era.  In fact,
most such folks make miserable tech writers.  As proof, I point you to
this list and the discussions that take place on it.  But since such folks
are so numerous and so difficult to employ in their fields of study and
expertise, there is a glut of tech writers and tech writer wannabes.
Hence the lower salaries.

> Never was, and never will be, a "he,"

> Janet