Group items tagged

Why do Jane Austen's literary works endure some 200 years after her death? The Stanford Literary Lab ran computational analysis on the words contained in Austen's work. Eschewing the fantastical and dramatic elements typical of novels both in Austen's lifetime and ours, Austen is more concerned with social realities and human nature. Her works display emotional intelligence; she employs more words about emotions and time, as well as abstract words connected to states of mind and social relationships.

"Everyone's entitled to their opinion regarding pronoun acceptability." The use of singular "they" has always been a bit disreputable - you might say it, but you wouldn't want to write it down. But now it's a pronoun whose hour has come. A few months ago, the Washington Post style guide accepted it. And it's been welcomed by people who identify as genderqueer and who feel that "he" and "she" don't necessarily exhaust all the gender possibilities. Universities allow students to select it as their personal pronoun. And so does Facebook, so that your friends will get notices like "Wish them a happy birthday." This use of "they" has been around for a long time. It shows up in Shakespeare, Dickens and George Bernard Shaw. Jane Austen was always saying things like "everybody has their failing." But the Victorian grammarians made it a matter of schoolroom dogma that one could only say "Everybody has his failing," with the understanding that "he" stood in for both sexes. That rule wasn't really discredited until the 1970s, when the second-wave feminists made the generic masculine the paradigm of sexism in language. Male critics ridiculed their complaints as a "libspeak tantrum" and accused them of suffering from "pronoun envy." But most writers now realize that the so-called gender-neutral "he" is anything but. Nobody would ever say, "Every candidate thanked his spouse, including Hillary." When you utter "he," you always bring a male to mind. But once the generic masculine fell out of favor, what were we going to replace it with? People weren't about to adopt a brand-new gender-neutral pronoun the way they were adopting gender-neutral job descriptions. "He or she" was impossibly clunky. It was time to restore singular "they" to respectability. And that's been happening, even in edited books and the media.