Word Court

Dennis Walikainen
Houghton, Mich.

I am bothered by the increasing use of the word chairperson, instead of chairman. Even more unsettling is the new custom of referring to human beings as chairs. A few years ago the American Association of Parliamentarians ruled that chairman is correct for both sexes, pointing out that madame chairman has been in use for years to indicate the feminine. What's the story?

Sue Girkins
Toledo, Ohio

I find a deep and disturbing clash between the grammar my demanding English teachers taught me and the current, almost universal, use of they as a pronoun for the singular word person and its synonyms. If a person was taught that this is the wrong way to say it, what are they to do about it?

William Belton
Great Cacapon, W.Va.

Sigh. I sometimes wonder whether the true purpose of all such issues isn't to sort readers by mental age. I've noticed three groups. The mentally elderly read something like "A freshman might decide that someday he wants to be the chairman of a big corporation" and assume that the person in question must be male--not so much because of the wording as because society used to be that way. Those of us who are a bit younger mentally can read that sentence without feeling that it excludes women. We learned in school that one of the meanings of man is "humankind": a freshman or a chairman can be a member of either sex. We also learned that there is such a thing as the "generic he"--a he that refers to any person, in a context where no particular person is present as an antecedent for the pronoun. People of my mental age group therefore wonder what all the fuss is about. Those who are still younger mentally make the fuss. When they read the freshman sentence, they, like the mentally elderly, suppose that it applies only to men--but they are enraged by the sexism they perceive. Unfortunately, their solutions to the problem, such as "A first-year student . . . s/he" or ". . . they," tend to annoy us fogeys. The former lacks grace; the latter is more grievous, for it compromises such logic as English syntax has.

A speaker or writer who is trying simply to express an idea, rather than to pick a fight with listeners or readers, needs to tread carefully. Changing freshman to first-year student is probably treading too far: women have been freshmen in great numbers for decades, and so the word carries no particular connotation of male privilege, or of masculinity at all. Freshperson is obviously impossible--but chairperson seems harmless enough. So does "A chairman [or chairperson] . . . he or she" or, when the need to keep using both pronouns results in something overelaborate, "Chairmen . . . they." Another possibility is to try to leave the contentious words out: "A freshman might hope to lead a big corporation someday."

I object to women writers. No, not to the authors themselves but to calling them that. Expressions such as woman golfer and woman politician are all too common in modern idiomatic English. The corresponding usage to describe a man in a stereotypically female role is always the adjective male: for instance, male nurse. This will surely be a better world when we no longer need to qualify nouns with gender. Until then we could improve the world slightly by using adjectives where adjectives are needed (female author, female golfer) and letting nouns refer to people, places, and things.

Barry Hamill
Minneapolis, Minn.

I'm sure most of us feel that this is already a better world, now that women and men have more choices about their roles in it. Having some choice about what to call ourselves is also nice. English generally does offer its users more than one way to say something--more than one correct way, for a choice that boils down to a matter of taste. Few find the likes of lady writer or of authoress tasteful these days, so woman writer is pretty much the only extant alternative to female writer--assuming that the context is not one like "Jane Austen was a writer," in which no purpose is served by specifying sex.

While it's true that the noun man is rarely used as an adjective, or "attributively," many other nouns are: think of bull rider, king crab, sperm bank. In fact, woman appears in dictionaries either as an adjective in addition to a noun or with the notation that the noun is often used attributively. At least, that's what is in the dictionaries belonging to this woman writer.

Have you recently had a dispute about language which you would like this column to resolve? Write to Word Court in care of The Atlantic Monthly, 745 Boylston Street, Boston, MA 02116, or send E-mail to MsGrammar@aol.com.