I am in favor of gender-neutral wording.

I have no grudge against those who assert that the English masculine pronoun is actually a neuter. In fact, people have got my back up by pretending that it was somehow proved to be a false neuter simply because some collectives of PC academics declared it to be such.

But the fact is that almost no one is always on-the-ball, and most people are never on the ball, and it's good to keep them from thinking that something is necessarily male or masculine simply because masculine pronouns are used.

My favorite resolution is one that I first observed in academic papers by economists; specifically, they would alternate the genders assigned to hypothetical subjects. (The prevailing practice seemed to be to start with a feminine.) This practice adds a few virtues to simple gender neutrality. First, the personal pronouns are familiar to the reader. Second, in many cases, two subjects subsequently are naturally distinguished by their genders, instead of by more complex constructions. Third, those readers who need to be awakened from sexist presumptions are often actively confronted with one gender where they were expecting the other.

(Naturally, some PC folk will leap on the first masculine or feminine that they spot, before discerning the pattern, and denounce the writing for being gendered. In some cases they do this in a sort of drive-by attack, and it's pure cost. In some cases, one can show the pattern to them and presumably put them on the road to being more thoughtful in general. In some cases, one does not so much try to get them on-the-ball as just throw the ball at them, in a game of verbal dodge-ball played to drive them from the court.)

Some years ago, various would-be reformers tried to push the idea of introducing a new pronoun — or something like a new pronoun — which (unlike it) would distinctly refer to singular things with personality but would be a neuter. The more clever ideas involved a sort of singularization of they, but all of the candidates that I saw were awkward — some indeed as if their creätors had wanted them to be so — and none really caught-on (though I'm sure that there's still some small organization or organizations trying to advance such constructs).

Another potential solution is to recast expressions in terms of one. Normally, I use one instead of the generic you. Like most people, I sometimes slip into using you not to refer to my audience, but to a generic person. Often this habit is innocuous, but one doesn't want to insult one's audience by seeming to make assertions about them which may indeed be true of oneself yet still offend them. Anyway, one can often serve nicely as referring to a hypothetical person of unspecified gender.

The Woman of Interest asked a question that I find interesting: Is this one a pronoun? As an alternative to the generic you, it plays a rôle otherwise assigned to a pronoun; and, like a pronoun, it has a reflexive form, oneself. Well, if it's a pronoun, then it's the only English pronoun with an apostrophe in its genitive, one's. My mnemonic, used to help people avoid using it's for the genitive its then fails.

Brought to my attention by the Woman of Interest:

Please hear the story of Guy Gabalon's heroic, effective, outside-of-the-box actions during World War II. Marine PFC Gabaldon is officially credited with single-handed capture of over 1500 Japanese during the struggle for Saipan in July 1944!

Then please sign the petition to give him, posthumously, the Medal of Honor that he was owed.

(There have been some grumblings about Gabalon being denied the medal because of his ethnicity. I suspect that the denial had far more to do with him having been incredibly successful using methods so alien to the military.)

There's a fellow who frequently comes to David's Coffee Place who looks and very much sounds like Paul Adolph Volcker. Paul Volcker was the Federal Reserve Chairman who bit the bullet and broke the back of the inflationary spiral that threatened to destroy the American economy (and thence the world economy) in the late '70s and early '80s. (His immediate successor was Alan Greenspan.)

Anyway, I have discovered that this fellow at David's Place spends much of his on-line time playing on Neopets.com. At first, I though this an amusing juxtaposition. But then I asked myself

What if he doesn't merely look and sound like Paul Volcker? What if he is Paul Volcker?

The economy is acting all scary, and maybe Paul Volcker is responding by focussing on Neopets! Or maybe the reason that the economy is going wack in the first place is that Volcker started messing around with Neopets!

Should economists be rushing to Neopets? Should we drag Paul away? I don't know!

I forgot to mention that last night I actually saw a stretch Hummer stage (turning east onto Washington Street from the alley between Third Avenue and Fourth Avenue).

Perhaps some such vehicles have a better use, but I'm inclined to regard them as an example of conspicuous consumption, and therefore as repugnant.

David's Coffee Place in Hillcrest has a rear patio and some sort of back room which have long provided meeting places for chapters of Alcoholics Anonymous and similar organizations. Yester-day, I learned that the new owners have applied or will be applying for a license to sell beer and wine. To-day I saw a notice on the front door declaring that, beginning on 1 May, the patio and back-room will be remodelled and no longer available for such meetings.

The notice also indicates that Babycakes is imagined as a bakery and bistro.

David's Coffee Place has been around for about 15 years, but it has only been a few weeks since I started hanging-out here. Now it is apparently to be gentrified. Perhaps I should be glad that I didn't have more time to get attached to it.

Up-Date (2018:01/30): Someone informed me of a change of the domain name for Alcoholics Anonymous, and I've editted the entry to reflect that change. That same someone asked me to include a link to a resource hyperlist from Comlumbus Recovery Center for those dealing with alcohol addiction. That's a bit tangential to the original purpose of this entry, but….

Yester-day I received an old Haldeman-Julius catalogue that contains a picture of David Oliver Cauldwell. He looked like some cross between a stereotypical Marine and Beaker.

The mail to-day brought four tickets from Television Preview:

You have been selected to participate in a survey whose findings will directly influence what you see on television in the future.

The thing is written to make it seem that the audience will be evaluating a show or shows (and my gut reäction was to be appalled that any of us in SoCal should be asked, it being bad enough that the thinking in Los Angeles has such a disproportionate and otherwise perverse effect). But I did a quick check on the WWWeb, and what I've learned is that the audience will really be used to test commercials, and otherwise be surveyed for their reäctions to consumer products. The shows presented will be old-and-probably-failed pilots or series.

I stopped at La Vache for lunch, and ate too much food. I entered planning to eat a salmon sandwich, and found carrot soup on the menu. I ordered a bowl (rather than a cup), and this in itself was a good choice; but I should then have forgone the sandwich (and its side of mashed potatoes), in spite of the anti-depressant virtues of salmon. I am now parked at David's Coffee Place, attempting to remain relatively inert.

Speaking — well, writing — of David's Coffee Place, my understanding is that the new owners are going to change the name to Babycakes. I think that this new name is a generally bad idea. First, David's Coffee Place (AKA just David's Place) is something of a neighborhood institution — a well-regarded institution — and a wholesale name-change will make people feel as if that institution is gone. Second, I see the particular name Babycakes as the sort of thing associated with something at best briefly fashionable.

I don't know whether Robert Francis Kennedy was engaged in plagiarism or allusion when he said

Some men look at things the way they are and ask Why? I dream of things that are not and ask Why not?

It was the former if he expected the audience to take the words as his own, and the latter if he expected the audience to recognize this as an echo of George Bernard Shaw:

You see things; and you say, Why? But I dream things that never were; and I say, Why not?

In any case, when Lionel Beehner said

It seems today's thinkers, to paraphrase Robert Kennedy, like to imagine a world that wasn't and ask, why not?

he was engaged in ignorance.

So to-day we learned that when I am very tired I might leave the Woman of Interest a long rambling message about problems of combinatorial mathematics.

Combinatorial mathematics is, on the whole, extremely useful; but it is deathly dull. And, while its usefulness obtains on the whole, some problems — such as that about which I left my message — are utterly unimportant.

In other words, I rambled about boring, useless math.

I am going to respect the LJ content strike to-day by avoiding even visiting any LJ sites.

I believe that the strike comes far too late. I believe that mere strikes of any length are insufficient measures. I believe that this particular strike was announced with far too short notice (something like five days). And I believe that a one-day strike will produce unimportant statistical results, as it will be followed immediately by a surge of postponed entries and comments.

I also believe that, in response to any action that either seems serious or looks as if it might lead to something serious, the LJ administration will emit more unmeant pieties, and that a substantial number of those who engaged in the action will be all too eager to believe the pieties, rather than to extract genuine and significant commitments.

None-the-less, one forgoes very little not to under-mine this effort. Vayáis con queso.

In the same message that I quoted earlier, a member of LiveJournal staff writes

Open questions

[…]
• Subscriptions – Should moderators be able to charge for access to closed communities?

And people are responding, positively and negatively, on the interpretation that LJ is contemplating adding support for such subscriptions.

What is more likely to have happened is that LiveJournal has reälized that nothing in their existing rules prevents a maintainer from imposing subscription fees (collected off-site) as a precondition for membership in an LJ community journal, and that one or more cam ho is doing just this. LJ doesn't want to become known as infrastructure for sex work, but they'd probably rather not ban communities only open to dues-paying members of fraternal societies. So they're trying to figure out whether to effect some sort of ban; and, if so, then how to do so.