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saffronhareSo, last Friday I attended a grammar and proofreading seminar. It turned out to be really useful. But I was remembering today a really fun moment in which I got to teach something.
We were taking a few minutes to talk about the use of gender-neutral terms, and sort of circled the plural pronoun a bit. Example: "If any employee is interested in this seminar, they should contact their supervisor."
The instructor was saying how this really isn't the most correct way to do it, strictly speaking, but it's become the most commonly accepted bad way to do it, so it'll probably start being the standard. Something like that. I asked what she thought of gender-neutral pronouns. In my daily work, I don't get to use those, but I know they exist and can think of a few places/audiences where they'd be appropriate...so I really didn't think the question was so far out there.
Silence. Then, the instructor gets all excited and wants me to explain. And here I end up going over to the projector and talking about the words zie and zir and all that stuff. I probably made some mistakes, but there are now 50+ more people who write for a living who have heard of this approach. Heck, I don't know if I'll ever get in the habit of using those pronouns myself...and it's not like it'll change the world or anything...but it turned into an interesting discussion.
At one point, somebody (genuinely curious) asked, "Where do people use these terms?" And I got to answer, "Real, live people use them in their real, live lives."
In this crowd -- meaning you LJ folk -- I am but a geek dilettante. A mostly centrist breeder, the driver of a compact SUV who listens to pop music on the radio and who would never remove the cover from the back of her CPU. But for that moment? I was theweirdest most counter-culture person in the room. Kind of odd. :)
We were taking a few minutes to talk about the use of gender-neutral terms, and sort of circled the plural pronoun a bit. Example: "If any employee is interested in this seminar, they should contact their supervisor."
The instructor was saying how this really isn't the most correct way to do it, strictly speaking, but it's become the most commonly accepted bad way to do it, so it'll probably start being the standard. Something like that. I asked what she thought of gender-neutral pronouns. In my daily work, I don't get to use those, but I know they exist and can think of a few places/audiences where they'd be appropriate...so I really didn't think the question was so far out there.
Silence. Then, the instructor gets all excited and wants me to explain. And here I end up going over to the projector and talking about the words zie and zir and all that stuff. I probably made some mistakes, but there are now 50+ more people who write for a living who have heard of this approach. Heck, I don't know if I'll ever get in the habit of using those pronouns myself...and it's not like it'll change the world or anything...but it turned into an interesting discussion.
At one point, somebody (genuinely curious) asked, "Where do people use these terms?" And I got to answer, "Real, live people use them in their real, live lives."
In this crowd -- meaning you LJ folk -- I am but a geek dilettante. A mostly centrist breeder, the driver of a compact SUV who listens to pop music on the radio and who would never remove the cover from the back of her CPU. But for that moment? I was the
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Date: 2009-07-22 07:53 pm (UTC)Also: I totally want to go to Physics camp next summer.
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Date: 2009-07-22 07:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-22 09:10 pm (UTC)