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GrammarTalk 16 - 21 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?" | | | -- 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? | |
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< | 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. | >
> | Michael:
If the gender of the pronoun "my" followed the gender of the words "she-daughter"/"he-son" surrounding it, then your example cannot help us know whether people assume a default male gender in general. That means that if we experiment with the terms of your story -- sometimes substituting "daughter" for "son", and at other times replacing "physician" with "secretary," "ballet dancer," "teacher," or "nurse" -- the "daughter" substitution should best alleviate reader confusion about the ambiguously gendered character's gender. 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, but male-associated, "my" refer unambiguously to a physician. | | | -- AndrewGradman - 20 May 2008 |
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