Third-person pronouns and gender equality

I’m going to put my technical writing hat on today – I hope this won’t be too boring.

Today, I was reading a Ruby on Rails tutorial, and found the following paragraph:

Controller classes handle web requests. The URL of a visitor’s request maps to a controller class and a method within the class; not to a static web page. When a visitor starts the request-response cycle by entering the URL of a Rails app in her browser, the app’s controller method gets invoked, typically gets or saves some data using the app’s models, and then uses the app’s views to produce the HTML to send back to the visitor’s browser.

The reason I noticed this, and am writing about it here, is that the third-person pronoun used to describe an application visitor is female: the URL is entered into her browser. Even nowadays, when more women are going to university than men, and women are starting (albeit slowly) to make their way into positions of power, this is still somewhat unusual. Don’t get me wrong: I think that using the female third-person pronoun is a good thing; but it still seems somewhat unusual to me.

When I was in high school (which, admittedly, was a long time ago), third-person pronouns were always “he” or “him” or “his”:

When a driver starts his car, he puts his key in the ignition.

English teachers would have marked it as an error to put “she” or “her” in this sentence, unless the context made it clear that the driver was female.

Over my adult lifetime, this construction has become less acceptable – since, obviously, if you use “he” for the neutral pronoun, the reader will naturally assume that the person in question is a man. But there hasn’t been an elegant gender-neutral solution to the problem. Some alternatives have been suggested, such as:

When a driver starts his or her car, he or she puts the key in the ignition.
When a driver starts his/her car, s/he puts the key in the ignition.
When a driver starts their car, they put the key in the ignition.

The first sentence is clumsy, the second sentence contains ugly slashes (or virgules, if you want to get fancy) and is even more clumsy, and the third sentence is grammatically incorrect. So what to do?

The solution I’ve started using when writing technical documentation is: use the female pronoun in one paragraph or example and the male pronoun in the next, alternating between them as needed. (I make a point of starting with the female pronoun, to get the reader’s attention.) This approach, I think, solves both problems: it treats women and men equally, and is easy to read.

Yep

I was looking through Bushwhacked, by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose, and found two paragraphs that pretty much exactly match my views on politics and the economy:

Capitalism is a marvelous system for creating wealth. On the other hand, unregulated capitalism creates hideous social injustice and promptly destroys itself with greed. A marketplace needs rules. From the very beginning, capitalism has required careful regulation. In the market towns of medieval England there were as many as twenty or thirty laws governing just the balance scales, and whether you could put your thumb or any other digit on the scale. Mostly what we’ve learned from the American experiment is that competition is good, but we need rules because people cheat. And there are some natural monopolies that need regulation or they end up in cartels that rip everybody off.

Government regulation and the much-maligned trial lawyers are the two instruments by which we control corporate greed. It seems to me government is neither good nor bad but simply a tool, like a hammer. You can use a hammer to build with, or you can use a hammer to destroy with. The virtue of the hammer depends on the purposes to which it is put and the skill with which it is used.

Annoying corporate newspeak #2

Yesterday, I got this in the mail from RBC Visa:

Take a break this month

No minimum payment required this month

Because you are a valued cardholder, we would like to offer you an RBC Royal Bank “Visa” payment holiday by waiving your minimum payment this January. Of course you may still make a payment if you wish. Please note that interest charges will continue to accumulate and the minimum payment shown on your next monthly statement will be calculated in the usual way.

So what they’re offering is an opportunity to pay them even more interest. And it’s not as if minimum payments are very large, anyway – I think mine is usually something like $10. Hmph.

Conversational topics

According to the dating site Plentyoffish, here are women’s ten favourite conversational topics:

1. Hopes and aspirations
2. Hobbies/interests in general
3. Music
4. Dreams
5. Romance
6. Friends
7. Travel
8. Vacations
9. Movies
10. Entertainment

And here are their ten least favourite conversational topics:

1. Politics
2. Other dates
3. Past relationships
4. Science fiction
5. Religion
6. Celebrities
7. Science
8. Antiques
9. Money
10. History

I’m surprised that #8 is on the list. Are there a lot of people who talk about antiques on first dates – enough to include this on the list?

And the fact that #4 is on the list says something about the gender to which I belong. I’m not sure what.

Assorted randomness

A few random thoughts:

The other day, I was walking down the Pottery Road path (in Toronto). It’s a fairly long, steep hill. About three-fourths of the way down, I caught up to a man who was slowly and painfully descending the hill with the help of a single metal crutch. At the rate he was going, it would have easily taken him more than half an hour to travel from the top of the hill to the bottom. And it would likely take him that long to get to anywhere from there (unless he was going to Todmorden Mills or the Fantasy Farm, neither of which is likely). Why was he doing this?

Today, I noticed somebody in the 1-to-8 express line at the grocery store who was trying to buy 16 items. I feel intensely guilty when I try to sneak nine items through an express line – I can’t imagine 16. I wonder what it would be like to go through life with that sense of entitlement – yes, that line is the express line, but I’m in a hurry and I’m special, so I get to do what I want.

And I got a notice from Rogers Cable yesterday that started off as follows:

New rates. So we can continue to bring you improvements through innovation, now and in the future.

At Rogers, we’re committed to enhancing your experience and bringing our best to your home every day. In order to meet the standard of commitment and ensure that our customers continue to enjoy the best products and services, it means we have to make some adjustments to our rates.

Look, I understand that sometimes prices have to go up. It’s the way of the world: prices always go up (except for certain kinds of computer geek stuff) and never come down again, and always go up faster than wages and income do. But I’d rather they not try to insult our intelligence by claiming that their rate increases will benefit us.

I’d rather see something like this:

Due to increased costs, some of your service rates will go up as of March 1, 2008.

Simple and to the point, and it doesn’t talk down to us.

Or, if they want to be truly honest:

Our company hasn’t been generating the rate of return that our investors and shareholders demand from us. If I, in my role as CEO, do not do something to fix this ASAP, the board of directors will throw my ass onto the street. So, I have no alternative but to raise your service rates to maximize shareholder value.

And, if I want to be old-school cranky about it, they could add:

I remind you that expecting better service at lower rates is a quaint and old-millennium way of thinking. This is the 21st century, the age in which corporations are king. So suck it up, viewers.

Oh, great

Just saw this on the Globe and Mail web site:

Heart attacks may not be reserved for the hostile and driven among us — anxious, fearful people also have a higher risk, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.

As if I didn’t have enough to worry about.

This is the perfect example of a negative feedback loop.

Owned

On Friday, somebody posted this notice to the Craigslist Toronto writing jobs board.  That notice prompted this response.

Okay…

Here, in its entirety, is an ad that appeared when I logged into Facebook today:

Sell Your Essays

Do you want to sit on 1 million dollars before your graduation? Please post your intellectual property.

Speaking of intellectual property: I just discovered that my master’s thesis has been cited in a paper as recently as 2003. Cool. (Even cooler: the person who wrote this paper and I are both former editors of mathNEWS. In my case, it was a long time ago.)

Blowing their own horn

I got a letter from Revenue Canada this week. Letters from Revenue Canada make me nervous. I always wonder whether they’re going to tell me about yet another payment I forgot to make.

Happily, this message wasn’t a dunning letter, but was just announcing some tax changes for small businesses (none of which affect me). Included with the letter was a little slip of paper, signed by National Revenue Minister Gordon O’Connor. This slip of paper contained this, in both official languages:

The Government of Canada has introduced a number of proposed federal tax changes benefiting individuals and businesses.

Reducing the GST to 5% and the HST to 13%, reducing corporate income taxes, and reducing small business income taxes are important steps toward economic growth and job creation.

The Canada Revenue Agency is ready to support you with technical advice to ensure the smooth implementation of the various proposed tax measures.

Note that this little message – printed on blue paper, naturally – doesn’t actually provide any useful information. It’s election campaign material thinly disguised as a public service announcement. I suppose that blowing one’s own horn is part of the political process – but do the Tories have to be so obvious about it?

(And I’m not sure that reducing the GST leads to economic growth. And, if it does, such growth would be regressive: poor people don’t buy as much, so a GST cut doesn’t benefit them as much as an income tax cut would.)

On a totally unrelated subject: it’s a new year. (You’ve probably noticed.) This means that a lot of web sites are now out of date, as their copyright notices are for 2007.  I recently discovered a simple way to fix this problem: instead of typing the year as plain text, just replace the year with the following JavaScript code:

<script type="text/javascript">

var d = new Date();

document.write(d.getFullYear());

</script>

Now, you never have to update a year again – this code automatically generates the year for you. And you can put this code in the middle of a sentence without any problems.

Happy new year, and all that!