Good because she carked it. Not that she would ever have used that word. She would have changed it to something ugly.

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If you’ve ever felt a twinge of anxiety at hearingsomeone use “humankind” as a substitute for mankind, or if you’ve winced at theproliferation of the politically correct suffix “person” — as in “chairperson,”or “policeperson” — when the more traditional “man” would be perfectlysuitable, chances are you’ve suffered from the corrupting linguistic legacy offeminist writer Kate Swift. Swift, who died lastweek at 87, was one of a squadron of feminist language police whose crusade toremake language to suit their political agendas has wreaked havoc on everydayEnglish.



Feminists had tried to reform language long beforeSwift and her fellow word scolds arrived on the scene. In 1949, feminist iconSimone de Beauvoir charged that language was “inherited from a masculinesociety and contains many male prejudices.” She advised that “women have tosteal the instrument” and “use it for their own good.”



Swift and her co-author, Casey Miller, attemptedprecisely such a heist in their influential 1981 book, TheHandbook of Nonsexist Writing. The book had two main premises,both of them dubious. The first was that sexism and sexual discrimination wereembedded in the English language. The second was that the language needed to beradically revised in order to change society’s attitudes and make it moreinclusive.



Informed more by feminist ideology than linguisticscholarship, the book’s suggested recommendations ranged from the awkward tothe downright absurd. For instance, judging the word “mankind” sexist, theauthors recommended that it be replaced with “genkind.” Not content simply toruin existing language, the authors also proposed feminist-friendly neologisms.Thus, “tey,” “ter” and “tem” were to become the sex-neutral surrogates for“he/she,” “his/her” and “him/her.”



Swift and Casey’s more eccentric suggestions failedto catch on, but their book proved a giant leap for genkind, unleashing a waveof feminist assaults on the English language. Picking up where TheHandbook of Nonsexist Writing left off, a “feminist dictionary” soonannounced in all seriousness that the word “brotherhood” could no longer beused to describe non-fraternal kinship because “it ignores generations ofsisters.” Emboldened, feminists insisted that women must now be referred to as“wimmin,” and that history had to become “herstory.”



Had such linguistic absurdities remained confinedto the pages of obscure feminist tracts, they would have been a merely anilliterate footnote to the history of modern English. But they became part ofthe cultural mainstream when the professional arbiters of language embraced thefeminist reformation. And so the American Library Association adopted aresolution pledging to avoid supposedly sexist terminology, while theLinguistic Society of America established a Committee on the Status of Women inLinguistics for the same purpose. Universities turned feminist recommendationsinto campus policies, and the worlds of publishing and journalism followedsuit, ruining language use for new generations of speakers and writers.



Not the least of the problems with the feministtheories of language popularized by Swift is that they were based on a fallacy.(P. see the Feminist Persontra, "Let not our cretinous ignorance stand in the way of our certainty") Contrary to feminist claims, there was nothing sexist about generic nouns like“man,” which had been used for centuries to describe humans collectively. Nordid pronouns like “he” exclude women, a point author E.B. White made in hisclassic style guide for good writing, theElementsof Style:



The use of he as a pronoun for nouns embracing bothgenders is a simple, practical convention rooted in the beginnings of theEnglish language. He has lost all suggestion of maleness in thesecircumstances. The word was unquestionably biased to begin with (the dominantmale), (P. Oh Dear ! He could have added somewhere that 'man' as a suffix comes from the latin, 'manus', for 'hand'. ) but after hundreds of years it has become seemingly indispensable. Ithas no pejorative connotations; it is never incorrect.



Now it was. History may have been on White’s side,but the culturally ascendant “herstory” was not, and it was feministpseudo-linguists like Swift who won out in the end. The result was a steadydecline in clarity and a surge in the kind of reader-proof, politically correctverbiage that today defines academic jargon — a writing style“somewheretothe left of gibberish,” as an exasperated graduate student onceput it.



Feminist theories of language also had spillovereffect that contaminated other academic disciplines. Just as language had to berevised to be more gender inclusive, so too did history have to be rewritten toaccommodate feminist demands. The result, as Christina Hoff Sommers has documented,was the proliferation of “filler feminism,” in which “non-sexist” textsexaggerated and embellished the role of women in history in order to compensatefor their regrettable but real exclusion. So what if women did not play acentral role in Native American societies? Feminist historians could claim inthe interest of non-sexism that such societies were actually “matriarchal.”Righting historical wrongs was now more important that writing accuratehistory. Not only did this do a disservice to history but it ill-servedstudents, of both genders, and fueled widespread cultural and historicalilliteracy.



Less radical than her feminist followers, KateSwift always disclaimed being a part of the “wordpolice.” But The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing inmany ways served as a model for later attempts to make language an instrumentof feminist politics and political correctness. And if she played a part in thetransformation of everyday English, three decades on its hard to make the casethat it was a change for the better.



Jacob Laksin is a senior editor for Front Page Magazine.



http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-scourge-of-the-feminist-word-police/?singlepage=true




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