Lanwench said:
As a woman with a background in English lit, grammar & writing, I must
disagree with you there. "Sir or Madam" is one option, but a better
one yet is to simply avoid the issue entirely.
Did you attend Indiana University? In 1994, they published a book:
"Guidelines to Bias-Free Writing."
Here's a review:
"The pharisaical, malefic, and incognitant 'Guidelines' is a product of the
pointy-headed wowsers at the Association of American University Presses,
who, in 1987, established a 'Task Force' on bias-free language filled with
cranks, pokenoses, blow-hards, four-flushers, and pettifogs. The foolish and
contemptible product of this seven years wasted in mining the shafts of
indignation has been published by that cow-besieged, basketball-sotted
sleep-away camp for hick bourgeois offspring, Indiana University, under the
aegis of its University Press - a traditional dumping ground for academic
deadwood so bereft of talent, intelligence, and endeavor as to be useless
even in the dull precincts of midwestern state college classrooms.
"... the Task Force seems to be nothing but a rat bag of shoddy pedagogues,
athletes of the tongue, professional pick-nits filling the stupid hours of
their pointless days with mugging the yellow-bellied editors of university
presses which print volume after volume of bound bum-wad, fated to sit
unread in college library stacks until the sun explodes... There they are,
in a stuffy seminar room in some inconvenient corner of the campus, with
unwashed hair, Walmart blue jeans, batik print dresses, and off-brand
running shoes, the synthetic fibers from their fake Aran Island sweaters
pilling at the elbows while they give each other high fives. 'Behold
"Guidelines" ye Eurocentric, male dominated power structure, and despair!' "
I personally despair of those who know not the difference between 'gender'
and 'sex.'
I managed to get the book. Not nearly as good as the review.
