Contact The Editor
Articles By This Author
Two types of people desire to impose politically correct locutions on the rest of us: those who possess unlimited power and fear to lose it and those who aspire to unlimited power and need a means to attain it. And there is, after all, no greater power than that of prescribing what others must say and what others must not think.
The Scottish Maritime Museum, dedicated to the history of the country's shipbuilding industry, has decided that it will no longer use the words sheand herto refer to ships, but rather itand its. This is in response to feminists, who have defaced plaques referring to ships as sheor her. This change would negate centuries of tradition, during which the words traditionally used on launching a ship, "May God bless all who sail in her," carried no connotation of insult or deprecation--rather the reverse.
The Maritime Museum's surrender is yet another instance of the craven surrender of British officialdom to the demands of a small but vociferous group of monomaniacs who make the imposition of their views the purpose of their lives. Museum authorities have argued that they must move with the times, and the prevention of vandalism is important, for economic reasons among others. Yet this rationale is something like awarding burglars a pension in an effort to prevent burglary.
Concessions of this kind will not reduce, but increase, the appetite of monomaniacs of different stripes. How long before the sexist opening stanzas of Lewis Carroll's The Walrus and the Carpenterare changed to appropriately gender-neutral language:
The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his its might:
He It did his its very best to make
The billows smooth and bright--
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.
The moon was shining sulkily,
Because she it thought the sun
Had got no business to be there
After the day was done --
"It's very rude of him it," she it said,
"To come and spoil the fun."
The sun, traditionally male in gender, is clearly of greater cosmic significance than the moon, traditionally female. Is not the moon's light merely a reflection of the sun's, rather than self-generated, and therefore a metaphor for the position of women in Carroll's society (and ours)? Does it not also follow that Carroll's poem is an attempt to indoctrinate little boys and girls into their future roles in the sexual hierarchy of their society? Should not future editions of the Alicebooks incorporate non-sexist language into the poem? And should not all past editions be withdrawn from libraries and bookshops, and the Internet censored accordingly?
Meantime, in Britain, the head of state, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, should be referred to as Its Majesty Monarch Elizabeth II.
Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
(COMMENT, BELOW)
Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal, where this first appeared, is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of many books, including Not with a Bang but a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline.
Previously:
• 04/15/19: Just Deserts: To deny that some cases have more merit than others is to dehumanize life
• 03/18/19: Theresa May's Lucky Defeat
• 03/11/19: Where 'positive discrimination' keeps a qualified candidate off the police force
• 12/31/18: Because I Say So
• 12/17/18: Enforceable Subjectivity
• 12/06/18: Boiling Over in Paris
• 11/13/18: Psychiatrist, Heal Thyself
• 10/31/18: Rationalizing Ugliness: How the modern intellectual screens reality
• 08/18/18: Spelling That's Right for Moi
• 08/07/18: Any pol who lives by cleanliness dies by dirt
• 02/26/18: 'Steal what you like, but do not flaunt it'?
• 01/29/18: Human Condition Commission
• 12/21/17: O, Brave Old World!
• 11/30/17: Mugabism Without Mugabe
• 11/27/17: Trash Studies
• 10/24/17: The Devil's in the Diction: The vague terms that populate our political discourse encourage lazy and often deeply biased thinking
• 10/17/17: What Happened to Memoirs? An acerbic Gallic take on Hillary Clinton's book
• 10/09/17: The Unanswerable
• 09/26/17: Of Dotards and Dithyrambs: On learning English from the North Koreans
• 09/12/17: Freedom and Art: What paintings from Lenin's Russia and Depression America tell us about turbulent times
• 07/05/17: Rights: Health even for the dying? Or immortality, perhaps?
• 12/28/16: Like a Candle In Berlin: On the curious habits of the spiritual-but-not-religious