Re: guidelines from the thought police

Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@calweb.com)
Mon, 16 Dec 1996 11:04:48 -0800 (PST)


> I was raised by a single female parent who held down a job as a college
> professor teaching mathematics and computer science, and I have always
> felt like I was totally untouched by the 'sexism' meme. Then one day I
> read something called 'A Person Paper on Purity in Language' by William
> Satire (alias Douglas R. Hofstadter.) It made me aware of just how
> sexually biased the very language I think in is (and it made me laugh at
> the same time!) I highly recommend it, but unfortunately don't have a
> URL to point you to. It's chapter eight in a collection of Hofstadter's
> essays called Metamagical Themas.

Yes, that's a marvellous paper; it was one of the reasons I have
investigated other Sapir-Whorf effects, studied Lojban, and on a
smaller scale, used neutral pronouns in the Oceania Constitution
(the ey/eir set).

Is anyone on this list able to contact Mr. Hofstaedter? If he
would grant permission, I would gladly place the paper on my site.