Gender Neutral Language: Ed Feser's Run-In With a Copy Editor

Here.

Bill Vallicella has some strong words for overzealous copy editors: “Keep your political correctness to yourself. Don't replace the gender neutral 'his' with the abomination 'his/her.' Keep your stinking leftist politics out of my manuscript. And don’t try to be what the Germans call a Besserwisser: don’t presume to know better what I want to say and how I want to say it.”

Amen. To be sure, I’ve had some very helpful copy editors, as I’m sure Bill has. But then, like him, I’ve also had some real fools. My “favorite” was the copy editor who ruined an entire weekend several years ago by filling the proofs of one of my books with something even worse than the abominable ”his/her”: the dreaded ungrammatical “they” and “their” sprinkled liberally and indiscriminately throughout the text wherever I had written “he” or “his.” Hence “Someone might claim that he can conceive…” became “Someone might claim that they can conceive…”; “Someone who puts his right hand…” became “Someone who puts their right hand…”; etc. Standard college student term paper stuff, of course, but something you’d think a professional copy editor would avoid like the plague.

Could such a brain-dead PC automaton get any worse? Yes “they” can. This one also put in “themselves” for “himself” – as in “A certain copy editor proved themselves unworthy of the paycheck they were about to receive” – and (the pièce de résistance) even invented a new word, “themself” (!) – as in “This particular copy editor made a complete ass of themself.” And it got even worse still, as the copy editor in question exhibited as feeble a grasp of English vocabulary as of English grammar : “glossed” (in the sense of “provided an explanation or interpretation of”) was changed to “glossed over”; “conception” was changed, throughout the text, to “concept”; and so forth.

As I say, I had to work day and night over a long weekend to fix up my poor book so that I could get it to the publisher by deadline – all the while trying to avoid a nervous breakdown and to resist as strong a temptation to commit homicide as I’ve ever felt.

Read the rest.

Boldly Go Where No MAN Has Gone Before!

My 12-year-old daughter, Malea, likes her some Star Trek.  The original series, that is.  I think she's watched every episode from every season twice.  So last night I asked her if she wanted to see one of the more recent films (2009) and, of course, she said that she did.

When we got to the end where Spock (the Spock played by Leonard Nimoy) does the voice-over send-off while the viewer gets a look at the Enterprise--to the delight of all who loved the original series--I heard Malea say something like "cool" or "awesome."  Any lover of Star Trek should have such a reaction.

But at the very end of the monologue there was a small surprise in store for her: "Space, the final frontier.  These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise.  It's mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before!"

I asked her if she liked the film.  "Yeah, it was really good.  But they screwed up the ending."

"What do you mean?"

"They said 'to boldly go where no one has gone before.'  It's 'where no man has gone before.'  Why did they screw up the ending?"

I then had to briefly explain to her that this was likely an instance of political correctness, and that there are many who think that girls like her are either not smart enough to distinguish between gender neutral tokens of the English word "man/men" and gender specific tokens of "man/men," or feel that helpless girls are being oppressed by the word.

It was a bit of a letdown.

This is another excellent example of the silliness of PC-whipped progressives.  The truth (within the fictional world) is that the Enterprise is boldly going where no man (i.e. for the dull-witted--where no human, man, and woman)  has gone before, not where no one has gone before, for almost every episode consists in going where persons of an alien race have gone before!  So instead of keeping a perfectly intelligible sentence, it is replaced (previously in some iteration of the series before that movie) with a more politically correct sentence which is false!

Better to say "boldly go where no human has gone before," since at least that is true.  But presumably whoever made the change had at least some aesthetic sensibilities and preferred "no one" because it sounds less clunky than "human."   Anyone with common sense would have just left the sentence alone.  But the left must infuse politics into everything.