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/Phrenology>to determine personality
types from head bumps.
Whiteghost.ink
On 31 December 2011 05:15, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari(a)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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