SILK PURSES AND SOW'S EARS
"INCLUSIVE LANGUAGE" COMES TO MASS
by Paul V. Mankowski, S.J.
Consider, if you will, the sad but instructive case of Brother Paulinus
Riordan of the Society of Jesus. In the late forties and fifties, Brother
Riordan worked in the library of the novitiate of one of the midwestern
Jesuit provinces. He could often be seen of a morning, so I've been told,
sitting at his desk with a pair of scissors, a pot of glue, several sheets
of thick colored paper, and a magnifying glass. His goal -- that is, the
Final Cause of his efforts -- was to help preserve the purity of Jesuit
novices, an entirely honorable task. His means consisted of snipping tiny
bikini bras and panties out of the paper and carefully pasting them in
position over the photographs of tribal women that appeared in National
Geographic magazine, so that no unwary reader be led astray into
unchastity. For the fact of the matter is that, though his work was known
and approved by his superiors, Brother Riordan was insane.
Let us turn then to a more contemporary setting: the National Conference
of Catholic Bishops. In a memorandum distributed to bishops last summer by
the chairman of the Bishops' Committee on Liturgy, the recipients were
asked to consider and vote on nine alternative translations of a line in
the Nicene Creed. The phrase deemed defective. <Et homo factus est,> is
currently rendered "and [he] became man." The options listed were these:
1. and became truly human
2. and became a human
3. and became a human being
4. and became one in Being with us
5. and became of one Being with us
6. and took our human nature
7. and assumed our human nature
8. and assumed our humanity
9. and became one of us
What we have here, I shall argue, is the spectacle of roughly 300 grown
men with scissors and paste, clumsily trying to install a kind of fig leaf
over something they consider unseemly in the Nicene Creed: an occasion of
sin -- not impurity, in this instance, but injustice. What they believe
they have found in the text, what they find an affront and a scandal, is
of course "gender exclusive" language. I intend to demonstrate that their
scruples, though as well intentioned as those of Br. Riordan, are no less
beside the point.
There is <no such thing as exclusive language.> It is undeniably true that
one can use speech to urge the consideration that women should be excluded
from this or that enterprise, just as one can use speech to demean
tomatoes or to insinuate that baritones should have no active role in the
social order. But the language in and through which these injustices are
advanced can of itself be no more "gender exclusive" than it can be
tomatophobic or soprano-centric. The concept of inclusivity (as its
partisans would have us understand it) is a phantasm, a category mistake,
a chimera buzzing in a vacuum. Exclusion and inclusion have a political
valence, but not a linguistic one, and the attempt to pretend otherwise is
itself a politically motivated fraud.
If a set A is so treated that subset B is distinguished within it, the
label or name given to A will have two meanings (or two uses): first, the
general or universal meaning, and second, that of all non-B members of A.
Linguists refer to the use of B as "marked" and that of A as "un-marked."
For example, if next to the word "pig" we introduce the word "piglet",
"piglet" is marked (for size) and "pig" is the unmarked form. Because it
is unmarked, "pig" has (along this axis) two meanings: pig in se, and
adult pig. In the sentence "I have one pig and eight piglets" the word
"pig" means the adult; in the sentence, "I bought three goats and six
pigs" we cannot know how many adults and how many piglets made up the
purchase. The second example is not an instance of "exclusive language";
no potential piglet is left out of the discourse; "pig" is simply unmarked
for size.
Gender contrasts are treated linguistically the same way. When a form
marked for gender is introduced, its correlative assumes two uses: the
gender alternate to the marked form, and the usage non-specific as to
gender (not the same as neuter). Thus we have "poetess", which is marked
for gender, next to "poet", unmarked. It is important to stress that the
marked/unmarked distinction is entirely independent of the sex or social
status of the speaker and even of the surface grammar of the language. We
find the feminine as the marked form in languages whose only adult
speakers are women. The feminine appears as the marked form in Sumerian,
the oldest of all written languages, which has no grammatical gender
whatsoever; yet we have unmarked dumu, son or child, versus marked
dumu-munus, daughter.
THE POINT OF ALL the foregoing pedantry is this: regardless of the
language, regardless of the speaker, regardless of the pertinent semantic
axis, the marked/unmarked contrast is ineradicable. To stigmatize on
particular operation of this contrast as sexist is as pointless as damning
the distinction between odd and even numbers as elitist.
The usage that the US bishops apparently wish to stigmatize is the word
"man" employed generically, on the grounds that the generic sense has been
lost in contemporary English and hearers today do not feel that women have
been included by the use of term. But of course "man" is unmarked not
only for gender but for a theoretically infinite number of qualifications.
Consider this sentence: "The men and officers of the second battalion will
return to winter quarters on Monday." Here the word "man" is being used
exclusively (i.e., non- generically), but it means, of course, not
"non-females" but "non-officers." The word "man" is not only unmarked for
gender but unmarked for military rank. Accordingly, in different
sentences it can serve the broader or the narrower function, usually
without ambiguity. There are, of course, certain linguistic situations in
which it may be difficult to tell which use is intended. For example, in a
pub you overhear a stranger say, "Jack's a man in my regiment." Does he
mean man/non-officer or generic man? A speaker of even modest skill can
ordinarily indicate his meaning clearly.
Now suppose for a moment you're serving as a military chaplain somewhere
and have just conducted a Mass in which you recited the Nicene Creed
according to the conventional translation. How would you deal with a
red-eyed infantry colonel who buttonholes you in the sacristy and
complains in a trembling voice that he feels the words, "For us men and
for our salvation he came down from heaven", exclude officers from the
ambit of divine salvific activity? If you have bought into the standard
inclusive-language mindset you're in a tough bind, for according to the
mindset it is the listener's subjective impressions that take precedence
over standard usage and over the intentions of the speaker. So if you
refuse to change the Creed to read, "for us men and officers he came down
from heaven," you're at a complete loss to explain your previous
concessions to feminist critics. And if you do make the requested change
you're incapable of refusing with rational consistency the next madman who
feels himself excluded by your language.
I want to stress that the jaws of this logical vice are formed not by
contemporary social realities but by the nature of language itself. Thus
for every "exclusivist" usage the Thought Police successfully manage to
stigmatize, another seven will spontaneously appear in its stead. For
example, the US bishops issued a statement which read in part, "the Word
of God proclaimed to all nations is by nature inclusive, that is,
addressed to all peoples, men and women." Yet by their own reasoning, "men
and women" won't quite do. For it could be seen to exclude children and
hermaphrodites, who are of themselves entirely human, in need of
redemption and addressees of the Word. Yet even the correction, "men,
women, children, and those of indeterminate gender" will still leave our
colonel sniffling in the narthex, and babies-yet-to-be-born certainly
belong to "all the nations," but fit into none of the listed categories.
Notice: this proliferation is stark nonsense, but the only objection that
can be tendered by the champions of inclusive language -- viz., that the
unmarked locution includes the various marked forms -- is one that
undercuts their own argument. Either way their project fails; the dilemma
is fatal.
The claim is sometimes made that the imposition of "inclusive" language is
justified by the fact that language changes over time; words change their
meanings, and the proposed diction is simply a tardy recognition of what
has already occurred. Well, it is true that the semantic range of a given
word is susceptible of change, and it is true that words referring to
males and females are as susceptible as any other, and it is true that
marked-unmarked contrasts are sometimes redistributed. Thus there is no
reason why the particular word "man" could not become a form marked for
gender in the future. Yet this only points up the futility of performing
the kind of invasive surgery on living language that is demanded by the
inclusivist project. (This demand is hard to understand on its own terms;
why so much effort to direct us where we can't help going? A surgeon
might alter a child's arm so that it attained its adult length, but we
would hardly call the process growth.) As new words and new applications
continue to be dumped into the active lexicon of a language, they will
continue to bud and fructify according to laws of linguistic nature, not
according to the strictures of political sensibility. You can see this on
any playground; and even in places where political gender-awareness has
reached its highest pitch, even in the US divinity schools, a
dyed-in-the-wool feminist will run into a room full of women, or women and
men, and say, "D'you guys want to order out for a pizza?" The unmarked
form can no more be pruned from language than can semantic change itself.
AT THIS POINT in my argument someone may object, "I'm not impressed with
linguistic reasoning on this matter. Whatever you say, I know I feel
differently now when I hear the word 'man' used generically than I did
fifteen years ago, and I think most people of similar background share the
same feeling." Now this curious feeling that surrounds certain words is
indeed widely shared; but it does not reflect a change in language
strictly speaking. Rather it reflects the operation of a supra-linguistic
phenomenon called a "taboo". For reasons of religion, superstition,
etiquette, and of course politics, certain locutions are stigmatized in
certain societies as unpronounceable or unacceptable. Sometimes they are
banned entirely; sometimes they are excluded from certain levels of
discourse. The word "left" in many cultures, various common words for
bodily and sexual functions, words referring to hell and damnation -- all
are examples of natural language utterances placed under taboo. On the
political level, one of the clearest examples has been given by the
sociologist Peter Berger, who said:
"My mother was from Italy and my father was Austrian. As a
child I spent a lot of time in Italy. This was in the 1930s,
when Italy was of course under Mussolini. Sometime during that
period, I forget which year it was, Mussolini made a speech in
which he called for a reform of the Italian language. In modern
Italian - - as in most Western languages, with the interesting
exception of English -- there are two forms of address,
depending on whether you are talking to an intimate or to a
stranger. For example, <tu> and <usted> are used in Spanish. In
modern Italian tu is the intimate form of address, <lei> is the
formal address. <Lei> happens to be the third person [feminine
singular]. I do not know the history of this, but it has been a
pattern of modern Italian for, I would imagine, some two hundred
years. No one paid any attention to this. Even as a child, I
knew what one said in Italian. It meant nothing.
"But Mussolini made a speech in which he said that the use of
<lei> is a sign of effeminacy, a degenerate way of speaking
Italian. Since the purpose of the Fascist Revolution was to
restore Roman virility to the Italian people, the good Fascist
did not say <lei>; the good Fascist said <voi> -- from the Latin <vos>
-- which is the second person plural. From that point on,
everyone who used <lei> or <voi> was conscious of being engaged in a
political act.
"Now, in terms of the empirical facts of the Italian language,
what Mussolini said was nonsense. But the effect of that speech
meant an awful lot, and it was intended to mean an awful lot.
Because from that moment on, every time you said <lei> in Italy
you were making an anti-Fascist gesture, con-sciously or uncon-
sciously -- and people made you conscious of it if you were
unconscious. And every time you said <voi> you were making the
linguistic equivalent of the Fascist salute.
"The "funny feeling" which we associate with generic "man" and with other
instances of inclusive language is the same twinge of uneasiness that
second- person <lei> would have prompted in Fascist Italy. The feeling is
not a natural response but a conditioned response to the stimulus. We
feel it because we have been coached to feel it. We feel it because, like
rats repeatedly given a jolt of electric current when they move in a
particular way, we have become aware of potential unpleasantness
accompanying certain behavior. That is how a taboo works. The Italian
who used stigmatized <lei> risked Fascist anger; the English speaker who
uses stigmatized "man" risks feminist wrath, but the phenomenon is
identical. The converse is also applicable. As Berger says, the
accommodationist Italian who said voi was giving the equivalent of a
fascist salute. The accommodationist bishop in our time who uses
"inclusive language" is making a little genuflection, a curtsy, in the
direction of feminism.
I HAVE CONCEDED the possibility that the usage of "man" could change in
the future in the direction that inclusive language partisans claim that
it already has. How would we know when this change has indeed occurred?
Only when classes of speakers insulated from taboos or indifferent to them
spontaneously employ the new usages, and when cognitive errors
spontaneously begin to multiply when the older usage is maintained. For
example, when unsupervised schoolchildren speaking on the playground talk
about a horror movie in which a mass of protoplasm is metamorphosized into
Tom Cruise and they say, "In the last scene, the Blob assumed our human
nature and became of one Being with us," then we can be confident semantic
change has taken place. Or when an intelligent little girl dives into a
tank at Sea-World and is killed, innocently believing that the posted
warning "Man-Eating Shark!" did not apply to her because she was female,
then we'd have a respectable linguistic case for changing our liturgical
language on the grounds that the natural language substrate had shifted
already. Such shifts are possible. They are not inevitable.
Perhaps the quandary in which the US bishops find themselves over the
translation of <homo factus est> is not so surprising after all. There is
one and only one obvious and adequate translation of the phrase, and that
has been excluded by taboo -- at least, by those taboos the bishops have
chosen to take seriously. It is to be expected that there should be nine
unsatisfactory circumlocutions in uneasy contention for the job of "man."
This is our language's way of telling us that it is in the throes of a
nervous breakdown. You can't forbid a language to act according to its
nature and then demand that it behave normally. You can't avoid saying
certain ordinary words any more than you can avoid stepping on cracks in
the sidewalk and not expect the manifold enfeeblements of neurosis. If
you come to believe those who tell you that your mother-tongue is wicked,
then you either have to find yourself a new tongue, or a new mother.
Neither replacement does credit to the innovator; neither enterprise gives
honor to the Church.
I CONFESS IT IS SOMEWHAT embarrassing to have to argue for the naturalness
of nature, just as it is embarrassing to make the case for the wholesome
effects of not putting knitting needles in one's ears. But the fact is
that we are being invited, indeed by our bishops, to sit at the table with
Br. Riordan and his scissors and paste and -- significantly! -- his
magnifying glass, to scrutinize with him the occasions of sin he has
diligently identified for us, to acknowledge those lusts buried so deeply
within us that we are unaware of their existence, and to paper-over the
obsceneness of places where we find no obscenity. Br. Riordan's partisans
in the 1950s may have justified his zeal on the grounds that he was so
much more pure than the rest of his brethren that he was proportionately
more sensitive to the nuances of impurity. I doubt it. And I doubt very
much that the champions of inclusive language exist on a higher plane of
appreciation and respect for women than the rest of us. In fact, though
my experience is obviously limited and I have no hard statistical data on
the matter, my own observations suggest that extreme sensitivity to
exclusivism occurs in men and women who are radically unbalanced in their
ability to treat women as human beings -- as opposed, say, to treating
them as means to political ends. When I see self-proclaimed advocates of
"gender-inclusivity" deal with those women who vocally resist
feminist-inspired changes to liturgical or other language, I do not find
in their demeanor the patience, attentiveness, humor, respect, or even
elementary human sympathy for the struggles of others that would count as
evidence for this Higher Justice they claim to have found.
Surprised? Then try to look at it this way: would you really want your
child to have for a babysitter someone who couldn't make it through this
month's National Geographic without whiting-out the photos? Would you
really want your sister to date someone who couldn't make it through the
Sacramentary without whiting-out the pronouns? Exactly.
In sum: inclusive language is a fraud. It may be a pious fraud, although
I am inclined to think otherwise. In neither case does it make our thought
more precise; in neither case does God's love for us shine more clearly
through Sacred Scripture and sacred worship. I applaud the dignity of
womanhood as I applaud the virtue of chastity. Yet, as Cardinal Heenan
remarked during the last Council, "<Timeo peritos et dona ferentes.>": I
fear the little men with magnifying glasses; I fear the hyper-sensitive
reformer with scissors and paste; I fear the experts, even when they bear
gifts.
Paul V. Mankowski, S.J., teaches Hebrew at the Pontifical Biblical
Institute in Rome. His essays have appeared frequently in First Things and
elsewhere, and he is a contributor to The Politics of Prayer: Feminist
Language and the Worship of God [Ignatius Press, San Francisco, ed. H.
Hitchcock].
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