| 词组 | gender |
| 释义 | gender The use of gender to mean "sex" has been cited with disapproval in books on usage for many years. Fowler 1926 seems to have been the first to raise the issue, and his remarks are typical: gender... is a grammatical term only. To talk of persons or creatures of the masculine or feminine g., meaning of the male or female sex, is either a jocularity (permissible or not according to context) or a blunder. The grammatical gender denotes a subclass of words that is usually partly based on sex and that determines agreement with other words or grammatical forms. For example, a French noun of the feminine gender, such as femme, "woman," takes the definite article la, while a noun of the masculine gender, such as fils, "son," takes le. As many commentators point out, sex does not always enter into it: the French word for "pen," plume, belongs to the feminine gender and takes la; the word for "pencil," crayon, is masculine and takes le. So much for grammar. The "sex" sense of gender is actually centuries old. The OED records it as early as the 1300s, and it was included as a standard sense in the dictionaries of both Samuel Johnson (1755) and Noah Webster ( 1828). Its use during much of the 19th century seems to have been, if not common, at least unremarkable: • ... black divinities of the feminine gender —Charles Dickens,The Tale of Two Cities, 1859 But by the turn of the century dictionaries had begun to give it restrictive labels. The OED described it as "now only jocular" in 1898, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries at the same time were calling it "obsolete or colloquial." Whether obsolete, colloquial, or jocular, the "sex" sense of gender continued in occasional use. By the publication of Webster's Third in 1961, we had accumulated enough evidence of its straightforward use in written contexts to see that the restrictive labels of the past no longer applied. But the real boom in its popularity was still to come. In the past two decades, the "sex" sense of gender has become increasingly common in standard writing: • Both genders usually use the same basic bag —Consumer Reports, March 1971 • ... have nothing to do with the author's gender — Erica Jong, N.Y. Times Book Rev., 12 Sept. 1976 • ... of a different gender ... from their characters — Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Saturday Rev., 2 Sept. 1978 • ... routinely screen for gonorrhea irrespective of gender —John J. Potterat et al., JAMA, 13 Feb. 1981 • ... excluded persons of their gender —Daniel Selig-man, Fortune, 5 Apr. 1982 Its use as an attributive adjective where sexual would otherwise appear is especially widespread: • ... shifts in gender identity —Robert T. Rubin et al., Science, 20 Mar. 1981 • ... gender expectations —Frederika Randall, TV. Y. Times Book Rev., 12 Dec. 1982 • ... the gender gap—the pattern of women voting differently from men —Nancy J. Walker, N. Y. Times Book Rev., 11 Mar. 1984 • ... what we call gender harassment —People, 15 Oct. 1984 • ... gender roles within the family are broader — Elizabeth Janeway, quoted in Harper 1985 And it has given rise to the derivative term, genderless: • ... belonged to a different, genderless world —Colette Dowling, N.Y. Times Mag., 28 Nov. 1976 • In these genderless times —James J. Kilpatrick, quoted in Harper 1985 The revival of gender in its "sex" sense may be partly attributable to the increased public attention now being given to issues involving men and women, as well as to the increased use of the word sex in senses relating to physical intercourse. (A column that appeared in the Boston Globe in 1983 plausibly suggests that gender is being used as a "reverse euphemism," inasmuch as sex "has become so much identified with TV violence and steamy soap operas.") In any case, there is no denying that the "sex" sense of gender is now more common than it has ever been. Most current dictionaries recognize it as standard, but there are still some books on usage (such as Harper 1985 and Shaw 1987) that discourage its use. |
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