Tag: ‘language’
February 23, 2007 at 9:38 am
As much as I enjoy writing, I must admit the English language has many failings. For instance, why isn’t there a gender neutral pronoun besides “it”? Calling someone “it” is either derogatory or means he/she (see my problem here?) is an insane clown that lives in the sewers. You’ve got “he” and “she,” but no word to refer to someone when you don’t know his/her gender. Typically you end up pluralizing the entire sentence so you can use “they” which can be awkward and sometimes sounds stupid.
I also propose that we need a new word to describe someone who is not fat, but isn’t thin either. There are already words that have submitted their resumes for fulfilling this role in the English language, like “curvy” or “full-figured” or “healthy.” But they come off sounding like euphemisms for “fat” which in our culture is pretty much a euphemism for “ugly.” When I wrote about Tyra Banks a couple weeks ago I said she had “some meat on [her] bones” which sound like I’m comparing her to [...]












