Women lawyers

On May 1, 6:42 am, LyricalReckoner <lyricalrecko...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Thought yous guys might enjoy Set in Style, a blog about law firm
> publishing:
>
> http://misterthorne.org/set_in_style/
>
> A recent post discusses the origins of those grammatically incorrect
> creatures known as women lawyers:
>
> http://misterthorne.org/set_in_style/2007/02/26/women-v-females-part-i/

I read the article; fascinating, but it misses the point IMO.  Sexism, or disparagement of women, has nothing to do with it except as an aftereffect of the samr root cause, i.e. that women are perceived as a minority in the profession.  It is very common in linguistics of all languages and all situations to use an undifferentiated, generic term to refer to individual examples of a subset that makes up the majority of the larger generic category, and to use some sort of adjective or attrributive noun to modify the generic term when referring to a member of the minority subset of that larger category.

Thus we use "cars" to refer to passenger motor vehicles in general as well as to refer to gasoline-powered motor vehicles, which is the image most of us have in mind when someone just says the generic term; but we say "hybrid cars" or "diesel cars" or "electric cars" if we are talking about the minority of cars with those different powertrains.   We don't say "gasoline cars" unless the speaker is specifically striving for parallelism in a context where wanting to differentiate them from other kinds of cars.

I believe they don't usually refer to "women doctors" in Russia because there, MOST doctors are women.   Currently, a slight majority of enrollees in USA law schools are also women.   Someday soon, it may be the "men lawyers" who need to be specifically differentiated when we are talking about that minority gender of lawyers, and we will assume we are talking about female professionals when we just say "lawyers", the way we do today when we just say "nurses".

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Mike Jacobs
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