Euro chiefs ban 'Miss' and 'Mrs'
We read:
"The European Parliament has banned the terms 'Miss' and 'Mrs' in case they offend female MEPs. The politically correct rules also mean a ban on Continental titles, such as Madame and Mademoiselle, Frau and Fraulein and Senora and Senorita. Guidance issued in a new 'Gender-Neutral Language' pamphlet instead orders politicians to address female members by their full name only.
Officials have also ordered that 'sportsmen' be called 'athletes', 'statesmen' be referred to as 'political leaders' and even that 'synthetic' or 'artificial' be used instead of 'man-made'. The guidance lists banned terms for describing professions, including fireman, air hostess, headmaster, policeman, salesman, manageress, cinema usherette and male nurse. However MEPs are still allowed to refer to 'midwives' as there is no accepted male version of the job description. ["midspouse"?] The booklet also admits that "no gender-neutral term has been successfully proposed" to replace 'waiter' and 'waitress', allowing parliamentarians to use these words in a restaurant or cafe.
It has been circulated by Harold Romer, the parliament's secretary general, to the 785 MEPs working in Brussels and Strasbourg.
Struan Stevenson, a Scottish Conservative MEP described the guidelines as "political correctness gone mad." He said: "We have seen the EU institutions try to ban the bagpipes and dictate the shape of bananas, but now they see determined to tell us which words we are entitled to use in our own language." Philip Bradbourn, another Conservative MEP, vowed to ignore the booklet, which he described as a "waste of taxpayers' money" and called on Mr Romer to reveal its cost. He added: "I will have no part of it. I will continue to use my own language and expressions, which I have used all my life, and will not be instructed by this institution or anyone else in these matters."
Seven years ago, an attempt to amend noise laws came close to effectively outlawing bagpipes. However, a number of bizarre EU rules remain in place, including a directive stating that every pair of rubber boots must be supplied with a user's manual in 12 languages.
Source
The ban concerned seems to be aimed initially at members of the European parliament but will no doubt be enforced elsewhere.
Younger Frenchwomen won't like the banning of "Mademoiselle" -- as use of that title for them tends to imply a youthful appearance. I predict that the ban will be completely ignored in France.
11 comments:
I wonder if "Mad-man" was redesignated, or since it is negative, it was allowed to stand...
Never mind that the word Man is the Old English word for human being.
The Old English distinguished sex with a prefix. Males were referred to as wer-man. (Wer survives today in the word werewolf) Females were referred to as wif-man. Since this is the case, a word like fireman would mean a human being who puts out fires. A policeman is a human being who is on the police force. A sportsman is an athlete of any gender who is a good sport.
A statesman is a human being who actually cares about his countrymen, where a political leader only cares about getting elected and spreading a political agenda.
This is an attempt, which started with the William the Conqueror's Norman invasion to ruin the English language
I was reminded of another article titled Watch Your Language with another aspect of getting rid of Miss and Mrs., which is worth keeping in mind. Those words give information to men as to whether a woman is available and approachable without stirring up jealousy in a husband, and it identifies who benefits from obliterating that information...
I command everybody to call me Princess!!
I'm reading your eloquent explanations, but i see no outrage, save for the first entry. Is this, perhaps, why they can get away with manipulating languages for their obvious political motives?
Great link Robert. Thanks for posting it.
You don't use outrage on ludicrous ideas. You use scathing mockery and civil disobedience. Next time you see a male Bobby, politely say, Good morning Sir.
Ludicrous ideas? Something that changes the bed-rock beliefs and traditions of an entire society is simply a ludicrous idea? Just coming up with the notion of PC is a ludicrous idea. Putting it into effect, and in many cases by force of law, is a very dangerous action.
Hello Good Gentles All!
Language is meaning and culture. People think as they do in large part because of the language they speak.
Language is the foundation upon which the entire social order is predicated. To debase the language is to strike at the very roots of our society. It is a crime and should be described as such. The liberal's even have a term for it: Cultural Genocide.
Hello Anonymous!
"You don't use outrage on ludicrous ideas. You use scathing mockery and civil disobedience."
I like your post very much. I have, over the last few years, become civily disobedient myself.
I refuse to use gender neutral Orwell-speak and I correct people who do. I simply repeat back the correct word when they mispeak. I do not complain, I do not speak in a harsh or offensive tone. I simply repeat back the correct word in such as way as to show that I am trying to clearly understand their meaning. Some people take offense (almost always women) but most simply acknowledge the correction and continue speaking.
My behavior is straight out of the liberal's play book: Think globally, act locally.
I am trying to make the world a better place one proper word at a time.
Pax,
InFides
InFides, you touched on an interesting point. When it comes to "PC-speak", it seems women are it's greatest users and supporters. (aside from people in TV-land and so-called intellectuals) Is it simply because women tend to be more easily impressed by what they may see as being "trendy"?
Hello Good Gentles All!
"When it comes to "PC-speak", it seems women are it's greatest users and supporters. (aside from people in TV-land and so-called intellectuals)"
Show me a 'masculine-feminist' and I will show you a person who thinks (and no doubt throws) like a girl. Sorry, I could not resist making this comment. :-)
"Is it simply because women tend to be more easily impressed by what they may see as being "trendy"?
I think not. My opinion is that this PC excrement is merely a disturbing public manifestation of a profound and deeply seated inferiority complex.
I have never met a real woman, who should more properly be called a lady, who ever bought into this PC garbage.
There will always be some people who can not play the hand life has dealt them by nature and circumstance.
We would all consider men who are so fixated on their inability to conceive and bear children that it affects their day to day lives and even their very thought and speach patterns as mentally defective and in need of medical care.
Yet, when women labor like beavers to emascluate their own male children by teaching them to play with girls toys, not play sports, not engage in the normal rough-housing which is a basic part of the boyhood experience, in short, when they seek to raise their boys as girls we say nothing.
These women do not have penises and the easiest way to act out their frustrations is by emasculating their male children. A profoundly disordered attempt to get a bit of their own back by cutting off (figuratively) a male's genetalia by socially emasculating him.
The only thing I have never been able to fathom is why the well adjusted majority of the population decided to allow the lunatics to run the country.
The results of this abdication of good sense by the majority has not been good for the nation. In homes where there are single mothers males tend to be very badly raised and have an enormity of negative social pathologies. The statistics are easy to find and I will not dwell on them here. I will offer only this observation: it is acknowledged that crime in the black community is much, much, much higher than in the white community. The interesting things is that when adjusted for single mothers the difference in crime statistics vanishes. In other words, when boys are raised by a mother and a father they seem to turn into good men, no matter their ethnicity. Single motherhood, and thus the absence of a father to instruct, destroys more boys lives than all other negative childhood conditions combined. The single best thing a child can have is a mother AND a father. This one thing has a more positive effect in a child's life than money, wealth, social position or parental IQ in determining his future. Any woman who elects to conceive children without a father being reliably in the home commits an act of child abuse.
Boys will be boys. It is the way God made them and attempting to change that by social reprogramming and coercion (can anybody say 'Ritalin') is only going to produce confused males and not women with 'outies' as some women would seem to prefer.
Pax,
InFides
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