[Discuss] Asterisk specialist sought

[Derek Martin]

On Sat, Dec 13, 2014 at 06:36:09PM -0500, Gordon Marx wrote:
> > On Dec 13, 2014, at 6:30 PM, Bill Horne <bill at horne.net> wrote:
> > A friend and former employer asked me to pass along his need for
> > an Asterisk specialist: I'm doing other things at the moment, but
> > if you are an experienced Asterisk man, please email him directly.
> 
> What if I'm an experienced Asterisk person who is offended by the
> presumption that the only people who have such experience are men?
> Was that his phrasing, so that I know not to work with him, or
> yours, so I know to view everything you post through that lens?

I happen to agree with your implicit agenda (gender equality and/or
anti-sexism), but not your reaction.  The usage above is traditional,
and language patterns are habitual and unconscious, and mostly hard to
unlearn, especially with age.  At the time many of us on this list
went to school (myself included), and quite possibly for a long time
after that via usage in our social circles, we were taught to be THE
way to say it.  Good luck getting that out of some of our heads.  I
know I still do it even though I usually try not to. Perhaps we should
accuse you of being agist for being intolerant of the usage? ;-)

For what it's worth, there are plenty of well-reasoned opinions, many
of which are written by women, indicting the gender neutralization
language reform movement, not the least of which is the notion that it
is sexist to think that women are so fragile that they require
special protection from traditional language.  Thus it's not even
especially clear that discouraging (let alone publicly castigating)
someone for failing to use gender-neutral language is the Right
Thing™.  It's just what's currently popular with the Political
Correctness Police.

Regardless, I think comments like this are polarizing and really have
no place here, given that there was not obviously offensive intent.  I
might agree with your point if this was regarding a formal job
posting, but this was nothing of the sort--it was just 3 lines of text
from one of our members.

It amuses me somewhat to think that if we were speaking German, or one
of the romance or slavic languages, and I think Hebrew also (and
probably lots of other languages), we would probably not even be
having this conversation, as it is virtually impossible to construct a
truly gender-neutral sentence in many of those languages.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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