Castrating the tongue

For those of us not up on the P.C. beat, March is dedicated to women's history. This is essentially giving 31 days to 52 percent of the world's population. Its goal is to make people aware that history is not only made by dead white men. \nI don't mind appreciating the good things women have done for society. As a student of literature, I remember George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, as a scientist I think of Marie Curie and as a musician I remember Clara Schumann.\nThough recognizing the achievements of the fairer sex does not upset me, what does upset me beyond belief is that there are those literati who would mangle the English language to accommodate something known as gender neutrality.\nA pocket style manual written by a woman, Diana Hacker, refers to sexist language as "language that stereotypes or demeans men or women, usually women." Well, what does she mean by "sexist language?" Words such as "hooker," "floozy," "sissy" or the infamous "girlie-man?"\nNo. Hacker says words such as "chairman," "congressman," "fireman," "mankind" and the verb "to man" among many others are sexist. Instead, she'd have us use "chairperson," "legislator," "firefighter," "humans" and "to operate/staff."\nTo me, the first set sounds the same as the second, and if anyone is offended at the use of such terms, then it is he or she who has the problem, and not the language. Saying "fireman" does not preclude the possibility that women have done the job, nor does it imply that it is a job for men. It simply refers to a man who puts out fires.\nWhat's worse, words such as "legislator" and "human" still have a male connotation. The correct Latinate feminine of "legislator" would be "legislatrix," and "human" contains a man just as much as "mankind." Removal of sexist vocabulary, then, is nothing more than a veneer, because implicit masculinity is deeply ingrained in both the grammar and vocabulary of English. Attempting to rid English of every "sexist" word would require nothing less than a complete restructuring of its most fundamental linguistic principles.\nJust because masculine terms form some of our most basic words and masculine and feminine terms exist for words does not mean that language has a slant against women. Saying "man the decks" should not be construed as a gentlemen-only event, because the term came from all-male ship crews.\nShould an elected man take offense to being referred to as a "congressman" just as a woman would take offense to the term "congresswoman?" Gender neutral reasoning would have it so, since it calls feminine terms sexist without stating why -- which makes it equally valid for men to take umbrage at masculine terms.\nWhat's so wrong with using a masculine term to describe a male and a feminine term to describe a female? We can have mailmen and weathermen just as much as mailwomen and weatherwomen. And we can even make up terms such as "senatrix" from senator (once an actual title during the Dark Ages), "paintress" and "sculptress" from painter and sculptor and "directress" from director. This can also work in reverse, too -- why not refer to a male seamstress as a "seamster" and a male ballet dancer as a "ballerino?" \nEnglish is a mongrel language with enough difficulties as it is, and we don't need political correctness and feminist lobbyists to screw it up even further. Difference in gendered language does not mean inequality, and it is ignorant to think so. \nGender difference does not equate to gender inequality in language. Whether or not in practice there is inequality between the sexes is of no consequence to the words themselves. They represent ideas, not situations, so leave them as they are and don't mangle our language.