XP: were or was?

Actually, we PC police no longer prefer the switching back and forth from "he" and
"she," precisely because it leads to confusion when one uses "she." The current style is to write sentences in plurals without switching or use "he or she." We also don't listen to lawyers or Strunk and White (who in the process of arguing against passive voices, cited an example that wasn't passive) on questions of style. I have far more taste than most around here for following antiquated rules as a matter of aesthetics--certainly more than fatboy--but not to the point of being obscurantist. The use of "man" for "human being" or "he" for "person" is now obscurantist.
 
I can tolerate the PC policepersons up to a point, but I cannot for one moment abide their calling me "obscurantist." The entire point of political correctness is to be obscurantist. The chairperson of the PC police must not have circulated the memo about eschewing "she" as a gender-neutral pronoun widely enough, because I still see such offenses constantly. Pluralization is no doubt preferable to that, but often inelegant, and when a writer uses the word "he," we all know what he means, so there is nothing obscurantist about it.
 
Speaking of which, a German artist who studied Native American tribes once told me that the names of many tribes simply mean "human being" in the language of that tribe. Because whenever colonizers first encountered them they would ask (using the universal translator) "who are you?" and they would, of course, reply "human beings."
 
There are numerous similar examples, it's almost its own branch of humor.

The River Avon, for instance, was the response to a similar question of "what's that?" and means the River River.

"Welsh," OTOH, was imposed from the outside and means "foreigner," rather than "poor Celtic bastards we have just dispossessed and driven into a cold, wet corner of the island."

Or so I have been told.
 
originally posted by SFJoe:
There are numerous similar examples, it's almost its own branch of humor.

The River Avon, for instance, was the response to a similar question of "what's that?" and means the River River.

"Welsh," OTOH, was imposed from the outside and means "foreigner," rather than "poor Celtic bastards we have just dispossessed and driven into a cold, wet corner of the island."

Or so I have been told.
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In one Terry Pratchett novel there is a mountain named "Who is this person who does not know what a mountain is? Mountain".
 
originally posted by SFJoe:
"Welsh," OTOH, was imposed from the outside and means "foreigner," ...
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Names assigned by other people are usually not good, e.g., Anasazi, Apache, Gypsy.

And, for those who are really up on their PCisms... kaffir.
 
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:

...and when a writer uses the word "he," we all know what he means, so there is nothing obscurantist about it.
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Please tell me in the following sentence whether "men" stands for human beings or male human beings and whether him is gender neutral or not:

"Man was a hunter before human population growth forced him to develop agriculture."
 
Unless there is something in the surrounding context that would indicate otherwise, that sentence is clearly gender neutral. It is extremely rare for anyone to use the word "man" in that fashion to refer only to male human beings. (Only counterexample I can think of at this moment: Alice Cooper's "Only Women Bleed.") It is theoretically possible that the next sentence would support a sex-specific reading (e.g., "Woman, meanwhile, stayed back at the cave and invented literary criticism") but unless there were something explicit like that, nobody would read it that way. The only reason there is even any arguable ambiguity in that sentence standing alone is because most people are likely to assume that such prehistoric hunters were indeed caveMEN and not cavepersons and thus a gender-specific reading might be more historically accurate than a gender-neutral reading. But if the author were intending to make that specific point it is very unlikely he would use the generic "man" to do so precisely because of that term's well-established gender-neutrality. "Males were hunters" would be the more natural choice.
 
Since I authored the sentence as a hypothetical one, you can create any context your wish. If you were reading this in a book written in say the mid twentieth century, I would think you would read it, contradictorily, as both referring to humanity and as being gender specific, under the presumption that men both hunted and developed agriculture.

Since both these beliefs have been more recently contested (some anthropologists have been arguing that women likely provided most meat in the form of small game, as well as doing the gathering) and others that women were more involved in developing agriculture, this sentence in a current book might be gender specific, contesting both claims or it might be a grammatic throwback. Assuming a species meaning, as a copyeditor, I would demand a rewrite.

I don't think I have ever come upon the term caveman or cave person in such a text. One does see cave dweller.
 
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
if the author were intending to make that specific point it is very unlikely he would use the generic "man" to do so precisely because of that term's well-established gender-neutrality
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i'd have thought that the mere existence of lawyers is sufficient to establish that there is no point of linguistic interpretation so established as to be considered well-established.

talk about talking is always with us.

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