Do men and women speak differently? This category is concerned with a complex question that has no simple answer. It’s too easy to generalize, and most Mars-Venus speech differences are unsupported with convincing data. But the sexes often SEEM to speak differently, and linguists are bent on finding out how.
An accurate and timely message: Many of the government abuses that George Orwell so accurately described turn out to have been accurate predictions as well.
Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
George Orwell
A profusion of pronouns
Pronomania [pro-no-MAY-nee-ah], n. an obsession with multiplying third-person personal pronouns to indicate a large number of genders, subjectively defined, resulting in the proliferation of personal pronouns, the announcement of “my” pronouns, and the user’s enhanced self-image and feeling of virtuous sensitivity to gender.
Some people think they know about pronouns. They know nothing. They think they can multiply English personal pronouns at will. They announce their “own” pronouns and feel virtuous. They don’t know that pronouns are one of a few classes of words that are so fundamental that the inventory is limited and rarely, if ever changed.
Linguistics consists of many sub-disciplines, all devoted to the study of language.
“Linguistics is virtually invisible to most people…”
— Roger Shuy, Language Crimes, 1996
“Critical Race Theory” is not going away. Although the slogan is heard almost everywhere in academia and education, almost no one inquires into what it actually means in practice.
It means a lot of different things, which is a good thing for its adherents and practitioners because, they can do anything they want in the name of this impressive- sounding undertaking.
It takes courage and clear thinking to question the all-pervasive indoctrination of Critical Race Theory. But what does the phrase actually mean?
As there is now an inexorable push to make Critical Race Theory a required part of America’s educational system, pushback is required. Kudos to Andrew Gutman, the Brearly (NY) School father who stood up, in no uncertain terms, to the relentless indoctrination to which his kid had been subjected (for $50,000+/year).
As Candace Owens notes, CRT is a double poison, taking time from teaching academic skills and at the same time producing a generation of non-thinking, malleable sheep.
From mind to thought (and from there to the speech and auditory organs)
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‘Why can’t human beings live simply and naturally?’ The trouble is that, as Susan K. Langer has said, ‘The symbol-making function is one of man’s primary activities. . .It is the fundamental process of the mind, and it goes on all the time.’
S.I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action
If you are on a continuous search to be offended, you will always find what you are looking for, even if it isn’t there.
Bill Kellogg
In the interests of political correctness Congress wastes our tax dollars scrubbing gender from its legislation. “Amen” is deemed to contain the offensive “men.” Why don’t other linguists speak out against this insanity?
Amen. < Old English, from ecclesiastical Latin, from Greek amēn, from Hebrew ‘āmēn ‘truth, certainty’, used adverbially as expression of agreement, and adopted in the Septuagint as a solemn expression of belief or affirmation.
[The version I learned in Hebrew School:] The Talmud teaches homiletically that the word amen is an acronym for אל מלך נאמן (ʾEl melekh neʾeman, “God, trustworthy King”), the phrase recited silently by an individual before reciting the Shma. (Wikipedia)
Politically incorrect speech is neither red nor blue. It is red, while and blue. It is American. Repression of speech leads to repression of thought.
This is a message that the p.c. crowd — in the media, in the universities – needs to hear again and again, because they don’t get it, especially when a Presidential candidate (Warren) announces “her” pronouns on the debate stage, and a teacher is fired for not using the student’s preferred pronouns. It is not enough, the argument goes, to have pronouns of two genders, when there are so many other genders. We need more pronouns!
MAGAZINE DESK
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 8-10-03; Sexed Texts
By Charles McGrath (NYT) 1113 words
Men — as we know now, thanks to investigators like Dr. John Gray — are from Mars, women from Venus. On our respective planets we, or our ancestors, learned to do certain things differently: shop, argue, deploy the TV clicker. To this ever-expanding list we must now add writing. Not writing in the literal sense of making marks on a page — though clearly there are vast differences there as well (legibility must be more prized on Venus) — but writing as linguistic expression. This is slightly different from conversation, in which, as Deborah Tannen, another of the scholars in the Venus-Mars debate, has taught us, the differences between men and women are so vast as to be almost unbridgeable without years of therapy.
