A Waste of Time and Energy

Today's Los Angeles Times had an editorial about a scholar named D. N. DeLuna. She invented a new pronoun, hu (pronounced with a short u, as in huh), to be used in lieu of his/her to replace the gender-specific pronouns, his and her.

The editor asks, "Is sensitivity to feminists and grammarians reason enough to reprogram our spell-check programs?"

To me, the answer is obvious: Don't use hu, or his/her, or any other silly concoction. Say and write things the way we have for the last 200 years or so. These machinations are the epitome of 'political correctness' gone awry. Besides looking absurd in print, these machinations are a waste of time and energy.

People who have big inferiority compexes and small minds somehow believe that a sentence such as "Sometimes a writer is his own worst enemy," causes a reader to be biased against women. They claim that readers will lose their gender bias if instead we write, "Sometimes a writer is hu own worst enemy."

See, we all feel better already! What total hogwash that is.

The 'politically correct' fanatics are incapable of solving large and complex problems, such as eliminating bigotry, abolishing world hunger, or ending terrorism. Instead, they nibble away at the edges of a problem by proposing fixes to the minor nits that their petty minds can grapple with. It's bad enough that they waste their time this way; but then they try to convince you and me to waste ours too.

With the proper techniques, parents can teach their children to have no gender bias, regardless of what words are on the printed pages that they read. But that would require us all to learn and practice good parenting techniques. Many people have demonstrated over the last 10,000 years or so that they are not willing to do that. Instead, they waste their time and energy contorting our language, which is apparently much easier.

No huperson being in hu right mind should make hu children believe that 'political correctness' really fixes anything.