Au revoir "Madamoiselle."

[No Elephants]

The French are officially doing away with "madamoiselle."

French equal rights activists have argued that it implied immaturity (?) and makes marital status an issue for women, but not for men.

Henceforth, the term deemed more respectful to the female gender will be used for all women, so call me "madam."

Oh, wait.....


http://preaprez.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/6a00d8341bf...

Despite my frivolity, I support equality for everyone and therefore support French women in this as I support American women in Ms. And I think it would be cool if Americans did away with Miss and Mrs. entirely.

As a woman, I often have to choose on a form among Miss, Mrs. or Ms.

I always choose Ms. However, now, instead of having to disclose my marital status, I have to disclose whether or not I wish to identify my marital status. Big dif.

And, no matter which I choose, I am also probably disclosing some of my political views.

Why is any of that necessary, simply to, for example, email my Senator, as is my consitututional right? It's stoopid.

It's also discriminatory because men don't even have to bother with choosing a form of address: all are Mr., unless they are children under a certain, in which case, very technically, they are technically Master, which abbreviates to "Mr." anyway.)

Seriously, how much time, ink and paper, not to mention awkwardness, could be saved by eliminating questions about Miss, Mrs. or Ms and justautomatically going with Ms?

For that matter, I'd be willing to drop all prefixes. Does anyone really believe that putting a Mr. or a Ms. in front of your name or not really enables you to know if that person actually respects you or not? (As a general rule, I probably respect people I call by their first names more than people I address as Ms. or Mr.) Failing that, though, let's go with an automatic Ms.

Yet, Republicans will stand as firmly on that as they do on all their stoopid issues.

Speaking of technically correct usage, "stoopid" is redundant when speaking of Republican political issues. Just so you know.

(This post is somewhat in jest, but only somewhat. Just so you know.)

[Leopolds Ghost]

1. aye but when will the French learn that prescriptive linguistics is (a) futile and (b) unscientific?

You can't legislate the mother tongue.

[No Elephants]

2. Yes, you can legislate the mother tongue. The French have done it for a long time.

.

You can certainly legislate which terms are to be used in government documents and in things created by government.

And the language used by government does impact the language used by individuals. We see that especially when one nation occupies another.(Why so many Arabs, even those without any education, speak English and French, as well as Arabic.)

And making language as nondiscriminatory as possible may not be scientific, but I think it is important.

We do plenty that is not scientifically proven to work. Why draw the line at which words go into government documents.

There was a time when no little girl ever aspired to be a policeman or a fireman or a Congressman. In part, I believe, though I cannot prove it scientifically, that the words for those careers had something to do with that lack of aspiration.

Of course, the lack of women in those professions did not help, either.

However, why should the burden be on anyone to prove that making language more equal will not help anyone? And why even worry about that? Why not simply do whatever we reasonable can to make language as non-discriminatory as possible?

[Leopolds Ghost]

3. Then again, Louisiana and Oklahoma have recently legislated to eliminate French, Cherokee etc.

English only is the policy Republicans (and Democrats) are seeking despite being two states that are home to indigenous foreign languages spoken by a significant minority. It cuts both ways.

When I say unscientific, I mean linguists have shown there is no "right" or "wrong" way to speak... Language is crowd sourced, like a meme if you will. If a majority of users sieze on the term Mademoiselle as a feminist slogan then that's what it becomes.

[No Elephants]

4. Language is not solely crowd sourced. It's kind of a cycle.

In school, we study classical authors and English grammar.

Then we (or some of us) become authors and start setting newer standards.

A dictionary is produced by studying and setting down how language is being used. In turn, though, we consult dictionaries to find out the proper pronunciation of a word and the correct definition, maybe even the correct spelling.

Teaching English grammar from elementary school through college and cconsulting dictionaries does assume that there is a right way and a wrong way to speak. So does the existence of the term "standard English," which has been used for as long as I can remember by English teachers and others. However, what is considered acceptable may change over time. So, as I said, it's a cycle.

Trade jargon, argot and slang are crowd sourced, but then there is a correct way and an incorrect way to use even slang.

I can't say I've been up on the latest slang since I left seventh grade or so. However, let's take a slang term from a number of years ago, "props." If I say, I took offense because they gave me insulting props, I clearly have no clue what "props" means and have therefore misused it.'

A meme is a different issue (and not necessarily crowd sourced. While a a crowd does help spread a meme, memes are often very deliberately and carefully planted and spread.)

Killing entire languages is also a very different issue.

And all this is very far afield from whether madam should replace Madamoiselle for reasons of making a language less discriminatory/offensive to women.