Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Fun with Pronouns

In Massachusetts, a guy killed his wife, went to jail.  Then he thought to himself:  Hmm, how nice it would be if I could slice off my dick.  Nicer still, if someone else would pay for it.  So he sued.
What happened next is somewhat obscure.  It would appear that a chimp escaped from the zoo, scrambled up behind the bench and, playing dress-up in the judicial robes that had been left on the seat, gibbered something that probably related to bananas  but which the recording secretary took to be a decision ordering the taxpayers of Massachusetts to pay for the dick-lopping operation.  (The chimp has since been euthanized.)    An amusing misunderstanding, save that, right now in the Bay State, that is the law of the land.

But none of that concerns us here.    With supernal calm, we contemplate the infinite, pausing only now and again to cast a saddened glance at the slowly rotating blue-green globe below.   No passions stir our breast as we (our own lease on life perhaps nearing its term, and not subject to sublunary renewal) behold the human comedy, interspersed with tragedy and farce.  Yet as a licensed linguist (I always carry my linguist’s license with me, in case a cop pulls me over), I cannot but comment upon a bit of pronominal legerdemain, committed by the Los AngelesTimes as it reported on the story:

Robert Kosilek strangled his wife in Mansfield, Mass., in 1990. He appeared several times during the trial dressed as a woman.

So far so good -- a bit of self-expression so dear to the deconstructionists (Louis Althusser, one of the French heroes of “the deconstruction of the subject”, likewise strangled his wife).  But suddenly:

Kosilek sued the state Department of Correction in 2000, arguing that her constitutional rights against cruel and unusual punishment had been violated when the state refused to pay for the sex-change operation.

A nodding acquaintance with biology suffices to remind us that the sinister farce of “reassignment surgery” in no wise creates any daughter of Eve, nor sister of the Madonna, or of La Pucelle:  but simply, a eunuch with misapplied chemicals in his veins.  Yet here, even before the offending member has been whacked off and tossed into the garbage (or -- Recycle!  Think green! --  served up for an appetizer at a gala dinner for the fashionably degenerate, as happened here:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/yourcommunity/2012/05/japanese-artist-cooks-serves-own-genitals-at-banquet.html) -- even before he can prance around, pretending to be what he is not -- even before some surgeon has sodomized the Hippocratic oath with a scalpel  and perpetrated the sordid outrage -- already the lapdog media (panting, its tongue hanging out, on its little legs) is awarding this murderous pervert  the feminine pronoun.   Merely as a grammarian, I must frown.
Ladies, it’s up to you;  but you might consider demanding that pronoun  back.

~

Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, some pushback:




[Update, 22 November 2012]  The French left denounces ‘freedom of conscience’:

Nouvelle marche-arrière de François Hollande. Le président a décidé de «retirer» l'expression «liberté de conscience» qu'il avait utilisé mardi devant les maires de France pour leur laisser le droit de refuser de célébrer des mariages homosexuels, a indiqué son entourage. Sa déclaration avait provoqué un véritable tollé à gauche, du PS aux Verts, en passant par le Parti de gauche de Jean-Luc Mélenchon et le Parti communiste.



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Si cela vous parle,
savourez la série noire
en argot authentique d’Amérique :

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