Law in Contemporary Society

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GrammarTalk 10 - 20 May 2008 - Main.AndrewGradman
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Eben made many corrections on students' papers involving number-agreement. For example, "Why does everyone ignore their passions?," as opposed to, say, "Why does everyone ignore (his) / (her) / (his or her) passions?"
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 I think for me this is definitely an extension of what for me is an awkward decision between using he or she as a general pronoun (although I've made the mistake on a paper for this class when he was clearly appropriate). However, I wonder if there is going to be a transition within the upcoming years of the acceptable use of the pronouns and what the acceptable use will be. I think Eben makes a very persuasive point about how precise we need to be given our future profession, but how long after a transition occurs will the change be found in legal language too?

-- AndrewWolstan - 20 May 2008

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Michael:
A father and his daughter get into a terrible car accident. They are taken to separate rooms of the hospital. The doctor in charge of the girl looks at her and says, "I can't operate. She's my daughter." Still surprised?

If the gender of the pronoun "my" followed the gender of the words "she-daughter"/"he-son" surrounding it, then this example cannot help us know whether people assume a default male gender in general. That means that if we experiment with the terms of this story -- sometimes substituting "daughter" for "son", and at other times replacing "physician" with "secretary," "ballet dancer," "teacher," or "nurse" -- the "daughter" substitution should be more predictive of reader confusion about the ambiguously gendered character's gendered. In which case, the outrage feminists feel when readers "default" the physician to male is really just an artifact of the author's choice to make the ambiguously-gendered "my" refer unambiguously to a physician.

-- AndrewGradman - 20 May 2008

 
 
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Revision 10r10 - 20 May 2008 - 18:34:29 - AndrewGradman
Revision 9r9 - 20 May 2008 - 01:05:59 - AndrewWolstan
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