Okay, be forewarned, I’m getting up on my soapbox:
Here in the United States, more so than in most other countries, we are obsessed with this thing called Political Correctness. Some people freakout if you refer to the entire human race as “Man” or “Mankind”. The PC’ers haven’t yet said anything about the ‘man’ in hu-man, but I’m sure that’s coming.
PC-ness even perverts our use of language. Consider the following sentence:
Only one person commented on my blog today, but he had a lot to say.
Now that’s the proper grammar. But since the english language has no unisex third-person-singular pronoun (we only have ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘him’, or ‘her’) Political Correctness intimidates many people into saying:
Only one person commented on my blog today, but they had a lot to say.
The word ‘they’ is plural which can’t apply to one person. (For a somewhat opposing view of this, see this Grammar Girl link.)
This may seem like a small thing to most readers, but for me it smacks of censorship. Not the kind imposed by a tyrant but instead imposed by a sinister inner tyrant – a self-editing mindset that has infested our country.
So… when reading my posts you will see the words ‘he’ and ‘she’ used interchangeably. I refuse to misuse ‘they’ out of some meager desire to please everyone. And don’t expect me to use ‘he/she’. That’s just an awkward attempt to placate the PC’ers.
I declare myself free from this Orwellian state. Men are he’s, Women are she’s, and Mankind is all of us. Our Declaration of Independence states that “…all men are created equal…” referring to our entire population – men and women. And that’s just fine with me.
So I hope the following offends as many PC’ers as possible:
My blog is written for all of mankind. When one person reads it, she might like it. When another reads it, he might not. I’ll keep to this as much as humanly possible. So good day ladies and gentlemen, guys and gals, studs and fillies, bucks and does, rams and nannies, He-man and She-ra …
Well, you get my drift.
Oh, and by the way, unless you want to change the Hebrew language, it’s God the Father.
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