I thought I had seen everything when it came to ways of resolving the problem of gender-specific pronouns in English. But on the way back from Wisconsin yesterday, I read a copy of David Brin's Sundiver (otherwise an interesting story) and was proved wrong.
Usually the problems you run into with English revolve around the pronoun he
: its use in a gender-ambiguous context is disputed and there are various ways of avoiding it. The word man
has similar problems, although it's a lot easier to find acceptable gender-neutral replacements. But in this story, Brin actually used man
in situations where the person indicated was known to be female! This leads to such eye-popping lines as:
He took her arm and introduced her to Fagin and Jacob.And if that doesn't strike you as odd, here's my personal favorite:
Sophonts, this is Helene deSilva, Confederacy Commandant here on Mercury, and my right-hand man. ...
Occasionally a man, male or female, would lean forward and peer at some detail on a screen, ...Ow! I had to read that sentence three times before I was sure I hadn't mistaken the words.
Comment by at 9:35 PM:
I guess it sounds weird, but it seem like it is just short for "human". ...and my right-hand human [person]. Occasionally a human, male or female,...
Comment by dburrows at 7:24 AM:
Yes, it's clear that "man" in those sentences was intended to refer to any member of the human race. But it strikes me as an extremely strange idiom; as I noted, I think the reason is that I'm only used to seeing "man" used this way when the gender of the person to whom it refers is unknown.