Wednesday, March 3, 2010

*Slams head on the desk*

*Sigh* One of my friends from school has started spelling words differently in order to be more gender neutral. She sent me an e-mail with 'woman' spelled as 'womon' and 'person' spelled as 'persyn'.The Grammar Nazi in me will not accept such abuses of the English language.It's not that so much that I'm against the use of gender neutral language*, as it is that I'm against the creation of gender neutral words by raping words already in existence for a political or social crusade. Especially when there is little logic to actually changing said words.

Take 'person' for instance.In an effort to remove male-oriented language, the already neutral word 'person' is seemingly further neutered by removing 'son' from it, 'son' being a male word.Only, that's like, Totally Wrong, dude.
Because etymologically, 'Person' comes to us from middle English through French, From the Latin 'Persona', originating in the Greek word prosopon. I.e., there is no etymological connection between the 'son' in 'Person' and the actual word 'Son', which comes to us from Middle English through Old High German, from the Greek sungenis. There is no reason to change 'person' to 'persyn', because the words 'person' and 'son' have NO etymological connection other than the fact that they both ultimately originated in Greek.
That's it.
'Persyn' is a Word Fail.
The same with 'human' (Changed to 'humyn'), which I formerly thought was already gender neutral, but which I've also seen furthered neutered.This despite the fact that 'Human' comes to us from Middle English directly from Latin (humanus) where the 'man' in humanus is not specifically male oriented.(Even if it is masculine in gender.) the English word 'Man' does'nt even come to use from Latin.It comes to use from Middle English originating in the Old English mon. Latin 'Humanus'.Old English 'Mon'. two languages, two completely different etymologies.
It's therefore also a word fail.

Now if you don't mind, I'm going to retreat to my lair,where everyone is a Grammar Nazi and they speak the received English language properly and don't ignore etymologies or proper spellings because it makes them feel nice.

*Nothing here, nope.But good to see you followed the asterisk!

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