I've already explained this. It's not in the policy itself, but the reasoning for it. The reasoning being that people used this type of language in the past because they were too sexist to realize it was wrong. I imagine that you didn't see this because you seem to agree with this reasoning based on your phrase of "nobody batted an eye about it." Of course nobody batted an eye about it, because there was not and is still not anything objectionable about it.
How is recognizing that such language was used in the past and not seen as wrong "seeming to agree" with saying that's wrong now? That's recognizing that the standard of what is considered socially acceptable has changed/is changing, not agreeing with any particular move. Probably there would be some that I don't have a problem with, but others that I'm less supportive of.
Or perhaps closer, when we hear of someone having a "gay time" in an old text, we know that they did not mean anything about same-sex relations. The word had a different meaning. We don't have the idea that they were too stupid to use the "right" word, but rather that the word itself changed.
Yep.
In the case of "he or she," however, there is a difference because it is thought that using "gender inclusive" language is the proper thing to do now and in the past, but that people in the past did not do it do to faults of their own.
Did I not already agree that this is the case with those who embrace a PC stance that says "we want to progress via our use of this word and not this other word (or whatever), as a means of being more inclusive than people were in the past"? I'm not sure why this is showing up in reply to my post as though I didn't already state that. Yes, I agree that the idea that such changes can be socially progressive is at the heart of this ideology.
But in reality the case is analogous to the case of previous uses of "thou" or "gay." In the past, when "he" was used in a common sense, it was not meant to mean that the statement only applied to men. To pretend that it did is to slander our ancestors.
"Thou" is matter of grammatical change, as English has largely lost its
T-V distinction (still present in other European languages like Russian or Spanish), leaving politeness and social distance to be marked by other means. "Gay" is a kind of semantic extension, from "carefree" to "promiscuous" (by the 1890s) to "homosexual", probably via young male hobos somewhere along the way (
seriously). Neither are therefore analogous to the kinds of
language planning done in the corporate world, as your own posts suggest by calling the changes "artificial". And so they are, though of course the question of their social function or importance is a different one (and obviously one that you personally place a lot value on, given how many replies you've written to me and others in this thread, arguing for your own view).
The part that I'm disagreeing with is that this is all somehow a slander to your ancestors because you read on a poster that it's not okay to talk at work like it's still the 1950s. It is a reasonable question to ask (as you have), then, what is so objectionable about the way they spoke back then that we should have to change the way we speak now, though in a work environment I wouldn't expect any answer more philosophically satisfying than "this is our policy". And certainly the people advancing these changes must think that there is some importance involved, either due to a perception that the people of the 1950s were full of racist and sexist attitudes that we don't want to replicate in our speech, or for some other reason. The point for me is then that if you don't go along, and continue to use the generic "he" (which wouldn't even be an issue in many other languages; I do it all the time in Arabic, since this is just the way that copular verbs are formed in certain types of sentences: "hatha
huwa al yom alathi san'ahu al-Rab" "this
is the day that the Lord has made"...huwa is the pronoun 'he'), is this therefore
restoring your 'slandered' ancestors? I wouldn't think so, since realistically very few people look at things that way in the first place. It is far more common to find people expressing things as MikeK has: We are to do better not in order to slander anyone's ancestors, but in recognition that we ought to treat others better than they were treated in the 1950s (or whenever), since we are (supposedly) more enlightened now as to these various social issues that they may have been unaware of. Perhaps the idea that this is somehow slanderous is merely the 'anti-PC' mirror image of the infamous allged over-sensitivity of the PC people, since the underlying rationale would be roughly similar (don't pick on my ancestors with your slanderous word choices v. don't pick on these minority groups with your offensive word choices).
It is not slander to criticize our ancestors for crimes that they actually committed. It is slander to invent new crimes that they did not commit, and criticize them for supposedly having committed those crimes.
Certainly, but my point was that nobody is immune from seeing themselves as somehow more enlightened than those who came before them, and that this isn't in itself 'slanderous', so that can't be the problem unless you intend to say that we ought not to have changed as societies at all since ____ (whatever indeterminate point in the past when everything was supposedly good and in order), because it's more important that we preserve the honor afforded to dead people (which using the generic 'he' does, somehow?) than to treat living people in a certain way. But I suspect that your criticism is for those who take these things too far, which I doubt anyone here realistically has a problem with or denies the existence of (I too have met people who make it impossible to enjoy an old movie or whatever because "look at how they're treating the women/the Indians/the children" or whatever...well, yeah, duh...that's the point; it's the old west, and this
is how white guys treated those people back then).
