sexist language

[Griff Smith]

In article <1988Nov9.200939.6069 at utzoo.uucp>, henry at utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
> In article <698 at packard.UUCP> shz at packard.UUCP writes:
> >Just a minor correction:  Substitute "staff" for each occurrence of "man"
> >in the below fragment, yielding "staff-hours", "staff-weeks" and
> >"staff-years".
> 
> (I have no quarrel with people who prefer to avoid the use of masculine
> words as generic forms, provided that readability does not suffer, but
> criticizing people for using legitimate English is ridiculous.)
> -- 
> The Earth is our mother.        |    Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
> Our nine months are up.         |uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu

This has gotten a bit out of context.  The original complaint was from a
Bell Labs employee who was reacting to company policy; in my branch of the
Labs we are corrected by our supervision whenever we refer to generic employees  
with masculine words.  If I remember correctly, the first response to that
complaint came from another AT&T employee who has either missed the required
Affirmative Action sessions or taken inoculations against them.  I think
the first posting was a sincere attempt to point out that the worm fighters
weren't just males.  I suspect the second one was more a rejection of company
policy than a complaint about the posting.  We're not criticizing people for
using conventional English, we're criticizing the convention.

This is already too much noise for a technical group; further arguments off-line please.
-- 
Griff Smith	AT&T (Bell Laboratories), Murray Hill
Phone:		1-201-582-7736
UUCP:		{most AT&T sites}!ulysses!ggs
Internet:	ggs at ulysses.att.com