{"id":908,"date":"2003-11-07T12:30:25","date_gmt":"2003-11-07T17:30:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/?p=908"},"modified":"2003-11-07T12:30:25","modified_gmt":"2003-11-07T17:30:25","slug":"inclusive-langu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/2003\/11\/inclusive-langu\/","title":{"rendered":"Inclusive language?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steven<\/a> is drawing attention to (and inviting intelligent comments on) a post by Steve Bogner<\/a> on inclusive language.
\n“Intelligent comments” — that would exclude me; I’m not good at discussing these things anyway, and I’m especially short on time and neurotransmitters today. So I’m just going to come out and say it (with apologies in advance for the rant):
\nMy personal perspective as a woman, a reader, a mother, and a Christian, is that I hate inclusive language<\/b>.
\nI hate it because I feel patronized when it’s in use. I hate it because I feel like its promoters, well-intentioned though they may be, are saying to me, “O woman, you are not smart enough to know when the words ‘men’ and “man” refer to the whole human race and when they refer to males. All those times you thought you were being “included”? Nope, you were being fooled. And your feelings are not strong enough to handle being excluded, even if you didn’t know you were being excluded until we told you. You can never focus on the universal, on what you have in common with men and women; you must always be focused on the particular, on yourself, your femaleness. Your feelings are too delicate to withstand the knowledge that there are males on this earth, and that they did things. The very fact that Jesus was a male is a stumbling block to you, and we must smooth it over. The very fact that He told us to call God Father — ‘Abba’, ‘Daddy’<\/i> — was an error; the only-begotten<\/s> reproduced Son<\/s> Offspring of God, who comes to make all things new, was a prisoner of His own time. (Jesus was not as enlightened as we moderns, of course.)”
\nI hate inclusive language because it insists that all the places I thought included me were actually excluding me. It seeks to drive a wedge between me and pretty much everything written before 1970. Inclusive language has robbed our language of the little honors paid to the feminine in the tradition of using the feminine pronoun for ships, countries, and abstractions. Inclusive language is the Mrs Elton in the garden of literature, the tacky boor who wrenches every spotlight towards herself.
\nI read pretty widely as a child and a teen, and I can remember one time and one time only when I misread the context of the word “man”: it was in a satirical essay by H.L. Mencken, when he abruptly shifted from “man” as “mankind” to “man” as “all males.”
\nIn real life, we can’t have relationships with Its. I can have a relationship with my mother, my friends, my husband, my little boy: they are Shes and Hes. My little boy doesn’t have Parents or Father-Mothers; he has a Mommy and Daddy. The Coneheads have “parental units” because they’re aliens; humans have mothers and fathers. Words such as He<\/i>, Him<\/i>, Father<\/i> invite us to see God as a real Person who seeks a real relationship with us. If we have poor relationships with others, including with our earthly fathers, our Heavenly Father can help us relearn Whom those earthly relationships are supposed to model. We need this intimate, personal vision more than ever in this impersonal age <\/a>of bureaucracy and broken families.
\nWe should not worry about “placing limits on God.” We should be thanking Him for, in a sense, placing limits on Himself, for the scandal of particularity. God, Who is so beyond us in every way, came to live our grubby daily lives with us, reveals Himself in images drawn from our grubby daily lives, ones that even little children can understand: Seeds. Drinking water. Daddy.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steven is drawing attention to (and inviting intelligent comments on) a post by Steve Bogner on inclusive language. “Intelligent comments” — that would exclude me; I’m not good at discussing these things anyway, and I’m especially short on time and neurotransmitters today. So I’m just going to come out and say it (with apologies in… Continue reading Inclusive language?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-around-st-blogs","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=908"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/908\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moss-place.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}