Thursday, May 18, 2006
(11:01 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Inclusive Language
We thought we had purged the English language of the supposedly "inclusive" masculine. One no longer says "mankind," much less "man." We are confused as to generic pronouns -- sometimes we use forms of "they," even with a singular meaning, or forms of "you," even with a third-person meaning, but certainly never a generic "he."And yet -- how often do we say "you guys"? We're very sensitive when refering to third parties and when refering to the human race as a whole, but when it comes to talking to people to their face, the "inclusive" masculine has slipped in through the back door.
Certainly part of it is that we don't want to sound like a bunch of Southern hicks, throwing around "you all" in order to make up for the English language's lack of a distinctive second person plural pronoun. Who would have thought that our Southern compatriots would have come up with the perfect solution to avoid a gratuitous "inclusive" masculine? Perhaps the incongruity is too great, so that people avoid it as if using a distinctively Southern turn of phrase brought too much baggage -- as if its very Southernness militated against the cause of tolerance and social justice, even if it objectively offers a way out of an impasse.
