Some Notes on Gender-Neutral Language General The practice of assigning masculine gender to neutral terms comes from the fact that every language reflects the prejudices of the society in which it evolved, and English evolved through most of its history in a male-centered, patriarchal society. Like any other language, however, English is always changing. One only has to read aloud sentences from the 19th century hooks assigned for this class to sense the shifts that have occurred in the last 150 years. When readers pick up something to read, they expect different conventions depending on the time in which the material was written. As writers in 1995, we need to be not only aware of the conventions that our readers may expect, but also conscious of the responses our words may elicit. In addition, we need to know how the shifting nature of language can make certain words awkward or misleading. 'Man' Man once was a truly generic word referring to all humans, but has gradually narrowed in meaning to become a word that refers to adult male human beings. Anglo-Saxons used the word to refer to all people. One example of this occurs when an Anglo-Saxon writer refers to a seventh-century English princess as 'a wonderful man'. Man paralleled the Latin word homo, 'a member of the human species.' not vir, 'an adult male of the species.' The Old English word for adult male was waepman and the old English word for adult woman was wifman. In the course of time, wifman evolved into the word 'woman.' 'Man' eventually ceased to be used to refer to individual women and replaced waepman as a specific term distinguishing an adult male from an adult female. But man continued to be used in generalizations about both sexes. By the 18th century, the modern, narrow sense of man was firmly established as the predominant one. When Edmund Burke, writing of the French Revolution, used men in the old, inclusive way, he took pains to spell out his meaning: 'Such a deplorable havoc is made in the minds of men (both sexes) in France...' Thomas Jefferson did not make the same distinction in declaring that 'all men are created equal' and 'governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.' In a time when women, having no vote, could neither give nor withhold consent, Jefferson had to be using the word men in its principal sense of 'males,' and it probably never occurred to him that anyone would think otherwise. Looking at modern dictionaries indicate that the definition that links 'man' with males is the predominant one. Studies of college students and school children indicate that even when the broad definitions of 'msn' and 'men' are taught, they tend to conjure up images of male people only. We would never use the sentence 'A girl grows up to be a man,' because we assume the narrower definition of the word man. The Pronoun Problem The first grammars of modern English were written in the 16th and 17th centuries. They were mainly intended to help boys from upper class families prepare for the study of Latin, a language most scholars considered superior to English. The male authors of these earliest English grammars wrote for male readers in an age when few women were literate. The masculine-gender pronouns(代词) did not reflect a belief that masculine pronouns could refer to both sexes. The grammars of this period contain no indication that masculine pronouns were sex-inclusive when used in general references. Instead these pronouns reflected the reality of male cultural dominance and the male-centered world view that resulted. 'He' started to be used as a generic pronoun by grammarians who were trying to change a long-established tradition of using 'they' as a singular pronoun. In 1850 an Act of Parliament gave official sanction(批准)to the recently invented concept of the 'generic' he. In the language used in acts of Parliament, the