Some years ago radical feminists mounted an assault on the English language in the name of "inclusivity." In particular, they campaigned against the use of historically masculine morphemes - he and his, for instance - as generic forms applicable to both sexes. They also objected to the word man in the sense of "humanity," and to similar immemorial English usages.

No one who knew anything about the matter -including the feminists - disputed that he, his, and man have in fact referred to both sexes for as long as the English language has been recorded. A look at any historical dictionary (the Oxford English Dictionary or the Middle English Dictionary, for example) establishes this irrefutably. No one has ever been "excluded" by this usage. But in their. quest for what they considered political and social advancement - e.g., working in a corporate office rather than at home, being a politician rather than a mother - feminists clutched at any grievance they could find, including the bizarre and false assertion that our genetic pronouns and word-forming elements exclude females.

Feminists promoted this notion even though they couldn't help but know it to be false. I remember talking about it with a woman whose intelligence I had always admired. "The sentence 'Does everyone have his pencil?' certainly doesn't exclude girls," I said. She concurred, "No, it doesn't. But why should the genetic pronoun be masculine?"

The answer lies in our language's own (Greek idios) features, which produce a language's distinctive idiom. We use he and man generically because that has been the practice in English since the eighth or ninth century. That is the English idiom, organically developed and time-tested. Languages are not made to order or amenable to latter-day quotas by gender. Nor are they forgiving of those who twist them out of shape.

A female research assistant I know used to use, properly, the term "one-man exhibition" for the shows of either a male or female artist. Then, as she said, her "consciousness was raised" so that always thereafter she used the term "solo exhibition." It seemed to me that her consciousness - instead of actually being raised to include the knowledge that man is the ancient Anglo-Saxon word meaning a human, a person, whether male or female - was lowered to the point where she would accept lies about the nature of her native tongue.

To represent historical usage as excluding females is to misrepresent the English language willfully, and this falsification leads directly to a special type of illiteracy - by turning standard English into a sort of foreign language and thereby making the rich heritage of English literature virtually inaccessible to the current generation. Accepting the fatuous charge that traditional English is intrinsically sexist and exclusivistic has led inexorably to a generation that can't read traditional English - that is, to an illiterate generation. By "illiterate" I don't mean they can't read and write well enough to function in society. I mean that young people have been trained into a misunderstanding of - and even a contempt for - their mother tongue. They have been taught that they need not - and should not - appreciate or acknowledge anything not written in Feminese.

On university campuses across the country this dubious program is enforced in classrooms. Writing standard English in a college class can get a student a failing grade. Totalitarianism lives! Students in "Women's Studies" departments take an author's standard use of pronouns as proof positive that he - or she - is hopelessly prejudiced against women. (Determining what's wrong with authors as measured by the crooked rod of political correctness is now the chief goal of literary study. But that's another story.) What young woman steeped in the Feminese dialect will grasp Dorothy Day's claim, "I wanted to die in order to live, to put off the old man and put on Christ"? One bright young woman I knew, conscientious in her studies and eager to learn, illustrates the point. Talking with her about authors who had been important to me, I mentioned C.S. Lewis. She said she had tried to read Mere Christianity but that Lewis's use of generic masculine language had made her feel excluded - even abused. Her internalization of false Feminese linguistics thus made one of the most accessible and humane of writers unavailable to her. What a shame!

But the linguistic engineering doesn't stop there. Consider the growing movement to give girls only feminist-inspired reading material. A recently published work gives various politically correct rules for selecting books for girls: The books must depict girls doing everything boys do, must show girls winning in competition with boys, must depict boys in traditionally feminine pursuits, and so on. The p.c. censors tell parents that they must be extremely wary about allowing their daughters to read anything written before 1970.

The result is a generation of girls who are cut off from the literary traditions - and the humane tradition - upon which our civilization is founded. This looks like child abuse to me - and ironically the victims are girls. It looks like an instance of the corruption of a child's engagement with literature just as real and as harmful as the moral corruption described in Inez Storck's article "The Corruption of Children's Literature (Even in Catholic Schools)" in the June 1998 NOR. Both types of corruption involve the teaching of falsehood, and both portend further cultural decadence.

Roy Barkley
Roy Barkley lives in Austin, Texas. A member of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, he is a permanent deacon and a professional editor and writer.

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