Having been distracted by all things to do with the summer holidays - Christmas cooking, long-distance driving, the beach, the Test cricket - I am behind with all things WP, but would like to add, belatedly, that I for one appreciate the way Sarah finds articles that need attention. It is educative (one of the reasons I am here), interesting and useful (sometimes I can help fix them).
Also would like to thank Anne for documenting so well the distinction between linguistic and biological/social gender. I am not a sociologist, but I suspect that efforts to draw social conclusions about contemporary biological/social gender relations based on data gleaned from linguistic conventions would be about as pointless, even if it was as appealing, as earlier efforts by phrenologists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenologyto determine personality types from head bumps.
Whiteghost.ink
On 31 December 2011 05:15, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 12/30/11 3:58 AM, Ms. Anne Frazer wrote:
...it's quite a mystery how the nouns are allocated a specific gender, and excuse this aside but I used to think on this and wonder why all the strong, positive, and creative words seemed to be assigned the grammatical masculine gender.
I'll let my favorite satirist Valerie Solanas answer this one: "Being an incomplete female, the male spends his life attempting to complete himself, to become female. He attempts to do this by constantly seeking out, fraternizing with and trying to live through and fuse with the female, and by claiming as his own all female characteristics—emotional strength and independence, forcefulness, dynamism, decisiveness, coolness, objectivity, vitality, intensity, depth of character, grooviness, etc.—and projecting onto women all male traits—vanity, frivolity, triviality, weakness, etc."
Ryan Kaldari
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