What are your pet peeves re English usage?

Pifka,
.....In African-American culture, we men know that Our best tool of survival is our, "mother wit."

While we exercise our mother tongue.

Piffka, you should be thankful you can dissociate yourself from "man's inhumanity to man".

Thanks, Booman. That's nice. I'll try to remember it. I'm sure you have loads of this, too. Is it the same as common sense... or different?

And, McT -- Mother tongue, of course.

I didn't mean to get worked up about this though when it comes up I see no need to sidetrack. <shrug> It's just a peeve o'mine.

How dare you be peeved, Miss Flyer, what do you think this is . . . uh, i mean . . . uh . . . never mind . . .

Setanta, you are a gentleman and a scholar... and very funny, too. <smooch>

Ooooooooooo . . . smooches ! ! !

We could dabble in some deeper waters...of which I know and understand little...but weren't most pre-christian religions centered round a Mother Earth or a Gaia-type goddess (celtic? and others) and it was the Christians who introduced the father figure to certre stage? Or maybe before them, the Old Testament hebrews.

Shades of The Da Vinci Code. Is the early Bible to blame for all this PC resentment?

I think that one can definitely demonstrate that the position of women suffered in northern and western European cultures from the introduction of eastern mediterranean values, such as those of the Romans and Greeks, and then more crucially, from the introduction of the extremely bigoted and misogynistic views of the Judeo-Christian tradition. I also consider that the problem simply grew worse with the Protestant Reformation.

Rumors of this thread's death have been greatly exaggerated, desu ne?

As most people here have had the good sense to ignore your antics and tantrums, it does indeed survive . . .

Set,

You're confusing the grammatical term 'gender' with the everyday use of 'gender'. In the study of language, 'gender' only means 'kind'.

I thought copulation was a polite way to refer to sex. :wink:

What's in a name? A rose by any other name would still sound as good.

I do sympathize with your peeve re: sexism in the language, Piff. However, I believe this is an emotional, rather than linguistic, peeve. When Alexander Pope said, "The proper study of mankind is man," I really don't think he meant to exclude womanhood.

Plainly not. It's their favourite pastime.

"Women. Can't live with them, can't live without them, can't refer to them in speech without unnecessary tautology or accusations of unreconstructed sexism."

Beware, McTag - you're on thin ice. :wink:

We've shifted from the science of language to the psychology of it. Wheee!

Peeves are personal things, I think, and not meant to be universal. I'm not bothered by "brotherhood" or even by "he" used when "she" could also be appropriate. If it applies to me I figure I'm in there somewhere. I think that an object being referred to as "she" probably does have a little something to do with the temperament of the thing, and a man's perception of it. It's a man thing, generally speaking, to refer to cars or motorcycles or ships as "she", especially if they require something specific to run well. Women don't, as a rule, speak that way. We say "it".

I think it's as likely as anything that men attribute a female personality to things because there seems to be no reason for the particular "behavior" of the object. Just like there seems to be no reason for a woman to say, "Fine. Go ahead." when what she really means is "if you do it you will pay for it for the rest of your life." It's a basic difference in men and women. Men just want to hunt and gather; they don't really want to talk about how they feel about hunting and gathering, and so are confounded by women who can talk for three hours about a a five minute incident. Men want to say "meat good". Women want to tell you what meat is good, why they like it, how they feel about liking it, how they came to like it, and how it affects other things in their life. And the man, who thinks he said all that with "meat good" stands bewildered. So, the motorcycle that runs with specific attention becomes a "she". :wink:

Virago

In that case, the expression "beating a dead horse" must have been coined by a married man . . .

I suppose, it was different, when Pope Alexander said such.