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Along Life’s Way
Neutering
Webster: A Fable
© 2018 Lois E. Wilson
Progressive University’s Gender Neutrality Task Force which consisted
of 6 women and 6 men had met several times with no agreement on how
best to cleanse the dictionary of gender-biased words. The PU committee
was determined to complete this mission at its final meeting before the
term ended.
One of the women spoke first, “I believe that we need to create a new
neutral syllable to be substituted for any biased ones that we find
offensive in words. For example, for the word ‘mankind,’ the word
‘person’ is often used to form ‘personkind’; however, the word ‘person’
is gender-biased as it contains the word ‘son’ which is a male
offspring.”
One of the men injected, “We could use an acronym to form the neutral
syllable you proposed. It could be the first letters of Gender Identity
Neutral—GIN. It could be substituted within words where the biased
syllables appear. Words would change from ‘manhood’ to ‘ginhood;’ from
‘ladybug’ to ‘ginbug’ and so on.”
A woman professor frowned and complained, “I definitely don’t like the
acronym—GIN. When I hear it, all I think of is hard liquor!” Another
woman member offered up a second choice, “Why don’t we use an acronym
that spells out exactly the purpose of our committee? Why don’t we use
the acronym for Sexual Identity Neutral—SIN? I like the sound of it
better when it is inserted into words: ‘persin’ for ‘person; ‘sinage’
for ‘manage’—what do you think?”
A male instructor who did not support the project exclaimed, “Oh, man!
I mean Oh sin! I must admit it certainly is a sinful solution! In fact,
if carried out to full implementation, it is true malevolence or to use
your solution it would be sinvolence! I withdraw from this committee.”
The instructor is back with his students trying to find some sanity in
the efforts of the committee he left. At last word, other task
forces at other institutions are still trying to neuter Webster.
Moral: Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the virtuous. It should
be left to the congenitally sinful, who know when to play with it and
when to let it alone. H .L. Mencken quote from his: “A Good Man (Sin?)
Gone Wrong”
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