Mona Charen Apple Pages "has traits that are not immediately apparent, however. While it’s a sturdy little word processor, its true personality is not revealed until you use the proofreader — or Proofreadress, as I now think of her. Yes, she’s female all right. Seems to have been designed and programmed by the women’s-studies department of the Cupertino community college.
"In a column about Rick Santorum, I had used the word “spokesman.” The proofreader flagged it: “Gender specific expression. Consider replacing with ‘speaker,’ ‘representative,’ or ‘advocate.’” Hmm. How would that work? The sentence read, “A spokesman said ‘there is little daylight between Ryan and Gingrich on Medicare.’” None of the suggested words would accurately convey who was talking. Every one would have changed the meaning and confused the reader."
....
"I ran Lincoln’s second inaugural past Proofie for fun. She was busy from the first sentence. “Countrymen” was a gender-specific expression. “In regard to” was deemed “wordy.”
Apple’s language sentinel has been schooled in political correctness at the expense of English. In another column I mentioned that the collapse of marriage was “aggravating” inequality in America. Consider “irritating” or “exasperating” instead, Proofreadress advised.
Why do feminists perceive it as a threat to gender equality to acknowledge that men and women are, in fact, different? Why are they unable to see that what is uniquely female — yes, I’m talking, among other things, about childbearing and mothering — has a value all its own? By denying the value of the uniquely female, they essentially say women are unequal to men, that what women alone can contribute to society is of less value than what men alone can contribute.
Words matter. If we obliterate all linguistic evidence of gender difference, we’ll have no vocabulary left with which to think of it — and our understanding of the reality of our very selves will be impoverished, too.
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