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(The New York Times/Betsy Huston) |
Globe Editorial
The recent death of Kate Swift, a groundbreaking writer and editor on all matters related to English and gender, provides some perspective on just how quickly our language has come to reflect equality of the sexes — and the key role Swift and her co-author played in that transition.
Swift and her partner, Casey Miller, made a career out of their realization that, as they put it in one book, “the way English is used to make the simplest points can either acknowledge women’s full humanity or relegate the female half of the species to secondary status.’’ In books such as “The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing,’’ they worked against a status quo in which the (mostly male) editors at major publications would regularly describe women based on their marital status or “pertness,’’ and in which there were presumed to be no female firefighters or male flight attendants.
Not all of their ideas were adopted; their suggested gender-neutral pronouns “tey,’’ “ter,’’ and “tem,’’ for example, seemed too artificial to catch on. But as Swift and Miller showed, language can be more accommodating without sounding forced; “firefighter’’ is no less evocative than “fireman.’’
Somewhere there’s some young person — a future male nurse or female automotive mechanic, for example — whose life is a little easier because our language has moved past so many “Mad Men’’-era assumptions. He or she should thank Kate Swift.
© Copyright 2011 Globe Newspaper Company.
