A quick note about “they” in colloquial English. It’s used for two purposes: (1) when the speaker doesn’t know the gender of the referent; and (2) when the speaker doesn’t care about the gender of the referent. For example, if I see a cell phone in the aisle of a plane as I’m exiting, I…
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Grammatical and Real-World Gender, Part II Earlier, I wrote about the difference between grammatical gender and real-world (or semantic) gender. I noted that the former doesn’t always indicate the latter. For example, personne in French is grammatically feminine but semantically inclusive. As promised, here’s a little bit about how to tease the two kinds of…
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Thanks to Dr. Jim West for bringing an essay by Professor Philip Davies to my attention. In it, Davies claims: Ethics develop in a society where individuals have to make their own moral judgments about intrinsic goodness. […] [T]he Bible cannot serve a modern democracy as a moral guide — unless of course we decide…
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Recent posts from my Ancient Wisdom, Modern Lives:
