cavernio (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} cavernio) wrote,@ 2006-12-07 10:04:00 |
|
Gender wordings
Gender wordings usually don't bother me. I'm not a rampant feminist, and I don't usually particularly care what wording people use, and usually don't notice that it might actually be sexist. In fact, when it does, it usually bothers me because thing have changed. Like when hymns in church have changed the wording to make it politcally correct, and it throws off the rhyme and rythme of the words to the music. (And also makes me sing the wrong words when canting since I know so much off by heart.) Or those people who decide to spell 'woman' as 'womyn' or 'wimin' because its not right to have to have women as a subset of men, or something like that. If you're gonna go that far, why not change the word's sound too? Its still pronounced the same so as to be a subset of men. Lets change 'woman' to 'wozam' and plural 'wozom'.
In any case, the opposite bothered me this time, meaning I think a wording is sexist. It mainly bothers me because I've found it in The Journal of Physiology, of all the uppercrust places. Eg: "We used a stimulus frequency (500 Hz)known to activate vestibular afferents in guinea pig and man..." This article was published 2005. I dunno, maybe its just me, but that just sticks out like a sore thumb. Their wording in general actually seems very odd, like the fact that they used singular there, and later on refer to 'the cat', as in, the entirety of cats, instead of saying 'in cats'. Maybe this is par for the course for scientific writings outside of social sciences, to not worry about sounding like it's the turn of the century, err, the turn of the previous century.
On a similar note, an article I was reading yesterday caught my attention by the authors use of superfluous commas throughout. I mean, even if the author's not natively english, which happens quite often and god knows how they manage to get papers published in english when native english speakers have to work hard to have everything worded just so, but that's one of the jobs of editors.
Gender wordings usually don't bother me. I'm not a rampant feminist, and I don't usually particularly care what wording people use, and usually don't notice that it might actually be sexist. In fact, when it does, it usually bothers me because thing have changed. Like when hymns in church have changed the wording to make it politcally correct, and it throws off the rhyme and rythme of the words to the music. (And also makes me sing the wrong words when canting since I know so much off by heart.) Or those people who decide to spell 'woman' as 'womyn' or 'wimin' because its not right to have to have women as a subset of men, or something like that. If you're gonna go that far, why not change the word's sound too? Its still pronounced the same so as to be a subset of men. Lets change 'woman' to 'wozam' and plural 'wozom'.
In any case, the opposite bothered me this time, meaning I think a wording is sexist. It mainly bothers me because I've found it in The Journal of Physiology, of all the uppercrust places. Eg: "We used a stimulus frequency (500 Hz)known to activate vestibular afferents in guinea pig and man..." This article was published 2005. I dunno, maybe its just me, but that just sticks out like a sore thumb. Their wording in general actually seems very odd, like the fact that they used singular there, and later on refer to 'the cat', as in, the entirety of cats, instead of saying 'in cats'. Maybe this is par for the course for scientific writings outside of social sciences, to not worry about sounding like it's the turn of the century, err, the turn of the previous century.
On a similar note, an article I was reading yesterday caught my attention by the authors use of superfluous commas throughout. I mean, even if the author's not natively english, which happens quite often and god knows how they manage to get papers published in english when native english speakers have to work hard to have everything worded just so, but that's one of the jobs of editors.
