Horizon

That's a new one on me. One wonders how they ever quote any text from more than a hundred years ago without becoming completely incomprehensible.

Come to think of it, I did once run into something close in a repulsive Roman Catholic polemic written by a Fr. Stravinskas. He consistenly used (sic) to sneer at opponents' usage, which was especially obnoxious when he quoted from radio or TV transcripts then (sic)ed each deviation from formal written English.

New versions of the Riverside Shakespeare and Chaucer can't be far behind.

I haven't noticed that particular misuseage, but there is a tendency to use (sic) as a sort of op-ed device rather than the signal of technical error which it is supposed to be.

>...there is a tendency to use (sic) as a sort of op-ed device rather
> than the signal of technical error which it is supposed to be.

Well...first of all, when using _sic_ ('thus') editorially inside a quotation, it should be put in square brackets [ ] rather than parentheses ( ) to show that it itself is not part of the quotation. More important, however, is that it doesn't _necessarily_ indicate a 'technical error' in the original quotation, although that is of course how it is most often used. In fact, it simply shows that the quoter is being scrupulous in rendering the quotation exactly as found in the original. It is left up to the reader to recognise why it is there.

I would wager that your average high school student or even university undergraduate today wouldn't have the foggiest as to what it means, let alone how it should be used. I once overheard two students in my Freshman Comp course discussing this weird device. They seemed to think it indicated that the quoter found the statement being quoted to be somehow repulsive, with the editorial interjection 'sick' simply misspelled.

cheers,

Henry

If you had been presumed not to exist by grammatical convention for two or three thousand years, perhaps you'd make a point of asserting your existence retroactively too.

I see Martha's feeling belligerent today.

Well, thank god. Now that we can "sic" pronouns maybe all those galluts will finally realize that women exist. Along with a well coordinated graffiti campaign, equal rights for all genders cannot be far behind.

If you had been presumed not to exist by grammatical convention for two or three thousand years

This is IIRC bollocks from a strictly etymological point of view.

Alan, I smell the etymological fallacy here.

Though I think the "sic" misuse is silly, I suspect that if I were an Esperantist, I'd certainly be a Riist.

I'm confused in either case. What etymological point of view are you talking about? The etymology of English pronouns?

English has not always had gendered third person pronouns. Some languages have never had them at all.

One of my old textbooks lists these OE third person singular pronouns in the nominative:

hē, hēo, hit, hīe

...for masculine, feminine, neuter and plural respecively.

The same book says that IE had the same distinctions in the third person.

What I mean is that there have been periods in the history of English in which the gendering of pronouns has been, to say the least, vague; as I understand it they were particularly blurry during the 12th and 13th centuries - a period which was not, so far as I am aware, particularly free of sexism.

From the Riism link provided by Ben:

Use of the pronoun ri parallels usage in many of the languages of Africa and Asia, such as Swahili and Chinese, in which the third-person pronouns have no distinction between feminine and masculine.

This isn't true in the case of Chinese. The male and female third person pronouns are homophones in Mandarin but they have different characters.

Ah, it appears that the gender distinction in Chinese was a recent attempt at "modernization".

My point about the etymological fallacy was that regardless of how closely 12th century English speakers associated "he" with the male sex in their minds, a modern speaker feels the same lack of a gender-indeterminate third person singular pronoun as they do a second person plural pronoun.

Alan, presuming the 12th century quote you're talking about is the reference to ou and a, the thing that struck me was their reference to the pronoun she as having been "drafted".