"Belabored Inclusive Language" and "Naturally Inclusive Language"

Cover for Knights and Ladies, Women and Men

A long-lost letter to the editor

There was a letter to the editor I wrote long ago and have tried and failed to find. It did not seem to come up in a search on the magazine that printed it; but I do not fault the magazine or its website because I also could not find it in my Gmail archives. My Gmail account is over a decade old, but the core conversation was a couple of years before I opened my Gmail account.

What I essentially said was as follows:

The common terminology of "inclusive language" and "exclusive language" is loaded language and harsh, exclusive language... It would be better to speak of "belabored inclusive language" and "naturally inclusive language."

Confidence and timidity

When I was on one consulting gig at a prestigious client, political correctness in language was present but not enforced. What I mean by that is this: I heard both the old style and the new style of language. I never heard someone get even a little upset at someone using "he" in an inclusive way, but there was a good chunk of my colleagues who used naturally inclusive language (N.B. including some immigrants), and a good chunk of my colleagues who used belabored inclusive language).

When people spoke in naturally inclusive language, without exception it was bold, confident, assured. And they did not seem to be thinking about being confident; they seemed to be quite undistracted in making whatever point they wanted to make.

When men at very least spoke (I don't clearly remember a woman speaking in anything but naturally inclusive language, although that was probably included), there was a timidity and a bad kind of self-consciousness. Even a divided attention. A man saying "they" for a single person of unspecified sex always had a question on his face of "Is this un-sexist enough?" Even men who were current with the belabored inclusive language of political correctness as it existed then had a perennial distracted question on their faces of, "Have I done enough?" with significant doubt as to any definite and positive answer.

This kind of divided mind is not especially good for business communication, or non-business communication for that matter.

Feminists don't even use inclusive language

Feminism is a bazaar not a cathedral, and one can find a mainstream feminist classic saying that "all the central terms [in feminism] are up for grabs" (and, presumably, one could also find numerous disagreements to those words). Even the term "feminism" may appear dated when this work is new; as of classes a decade ago feminism was working on a far-reaching rebranding as "gender studies", and I tolerate both that this work's treatment of feminism will likely appear dated in five or ten years, and for that matter might have appeared dated to feminist readers ten years ago. However, as no form of feminism that has emerged that I am aware of has yet been stable, I am not particularly interested in endlessly updating a minor work to keep up with fashions.

My point is this. I have read feminists at length. I have spoken with people and met its live form. I have taken a graduate course in feminist theology. One of my advisors was big enough in egalitarian circles to be a plenary speaker at Christians for "Biblical" Equality. And I have yet to read a feminist author use inclusive language. Ever.

How?

What do I mean by that?

The essential feminist bailiwick, the area of primary feminist concern, is members of the human species and the human race, Homo sapiens, who are female, for the entirety of life, from whenever life is considered to begin, to whenever life is considered to end.

And the universal feminist-used term for a member of this bailiwick is not "human female" or "female human." It is "woman."

Do you see something odd?

Without imposing nearly so great a reform program to create a politically correct English, we have a mainstream English term that begins and ends neatly where the bailiwick begins and ends, and a pronoun that works perfectly: "she." This amounts to a much smaller shift in language than migrating from "man-hours" to "work-hours", "waiter" or "waitress" to "server" and "waitstaff", and selling "five-seat licenses," a term which engenders considerable confusion about what part of the body most makes us human. By contrast, even cattle have historically been given enough dignity to be counted by the head. "Head" may be taken to have an undesired second meaning now, but couldn't we at least be counted by the spine?

But every single feminist author I've read is content to refer to the entire bailiwick as "women."

"Woman," age-wise, is not inclusive language. It refers to adults alone, according to the shallow view of communication, and if "man" excludes "woman", "woman" excludes "female children."

It happens that feminist authors, at least for a present discussion, will talk about human females who are seniors and cope with issues about aging, or girls in math classes (classes which seem to always being given an 'F'). And if a feminist author is writing about minors alone, she may refer to the human females in question as "girls." But I have yet to read a feminist source of any decade use any other term at all for any member of the whole bailiwick. The sense is that when you write "woman," female minors are spoken for. There is no felt need to specify "women and girls" (or, to perhaps pursue a familiar logic, "girls and women") when the group of females in question is mixed and includes minors. Nor, as far as principles and general approach, is there any concept that a good solution for adult women might be misguided if applied to minors. There might be storms of protest at some strain of literature that says, "A man should watch his step carefully all the days of his life," and the required, and almost hysterical, allegation placed that the author in question had not conceived of any advice that considers women, and this hysterical enough allegation may be accompanied by ostensible clarification that the text should only be quoted as "A man [Sic] should watch his [Sic] step carefully all the days of his [Sic] life." But there is no uproar, there is not a whisper of dissent, when discussions of "women" are taken to obviously fully include girls unless excluded by context such as discussion of distinctively senior needs.

If you look at feminist use of the term "woman", with blindingly obvious concern for all human females, you have a remarkably good working model for how a good, naturally inclusive language might function.

Read more of Knights and Ladies, Women and Men on Amazon!