Gendered language — Emanuel Cleaver’s Goof

One of the best ways to increase engagement on social media these days is through these ‘men vs women’ discussions — the so-called gender wars.

There is debate on if social media influenced the offline world (the pronounced cancel culture), or vice versa. Whatever it is, discussions on gendered language has gained momentum in the last few years in the West.

Gendered language is commonly understood as language that has a bias towards a particular sex or social gender.

English is referred to as a gendered language.

A prime example advocates point to is the way the titles “Mr.,” “Miss,” and “Mrs.” are used.

“Mr.” can refer to any man, regardless of whether he is single or married, but “Miss” and “Mrs.” define women by whether they are married, which until quite recently meant defining them by their relationships with men.

Yoruba is a gender neutral language. It has no distinctions of grammatical gender. Gendered pronouns such as he or she do not exist in Yoruba language. Words like brother, sister, son and daughter also do not exist. Instead, the most important organizing category is age. Therefore, people are classified by whether they are égbǫn (older sibling) or aburo (younger sibling).

Many people thus say that English and languages like it should be like Yoruba language. In 2018, Service Canada, the program in charge of Canada’s pensions and social security, said employees must use gender neutral language. No more words “sir”, “madam”, “father” and “mother” when interacting with staff for the first time. Parent may be used in place of them.

Folks are asking why there is ‘male’ in ‘female’ and ‘man’ in ‘woman’. They are wondering why we have to use male-centric words like “chairman” and “policeman” as opposed to “chair” or “police officer”

If you understand French, you know how the masculine prevails over feminine in plural nouns. In 2017, a group of 314 teachers in France declared they would no longer teach that rule, saying it’s sexist.

It was in 2012 that teachers in Sweden decided that they no longer want the words ‘him’ and ‘her’. Instead, they replaced it with an artificial genderless pronoun “hen”. In 2015, Sweden added the gender-neutral pronoun to its dictionary.

Always not to be outdone, Joe Biden’s Democratic party through Nancy Pelosi, who has just been newly re-elected House Speaker, has proposed to ban all gendered pronouns. The move would do away with any gender-specific references, including he and she, and aunts and uncles.

Yesterday, to add his voice to the case for gender neutrality, Democrat representative Emanuel Cleaver was asked to deliver the opening prayer as the 117th Congress opened, he ended the prayer by saying the words, ‘Amen and Awomen’.

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