Shock:, gender, and "What was sie thinking?"

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I am currently reading Shock: social science fiction, by Joshua Newman. I quote the book:

Shock: uses genderless personal pronouns when the gender of a person - a character or a player - is unknown or irrelevant. In these cases, Shock: doesn't use "he", "his", "him", "himself", "she", "her", "herself" or "hers", using the pronouns favored by many contemporary gender theorists: "sie" "hir" "hirself", and "hirs". If this makes you uncomfortable, that's what a Shock is. If they don't, you'll feel right at home playing.
It doesn't make me uncomfortable, but it does make for uncomfortable reading. Let's leave aside the question whether these gender neutral pronouns serve any worthy puprose, either in this game text or in general. What I want to say is something concerning this contemporary gender theorist: What on earth was sie thinking when sie decided that the German female pronoun "sie" was a spiffy choice for a gender-neutral English pronoun? How can anyone be supposed to read a text wherein this obviously non-English word appears and not have associations with the German word for "she"?

Comments

  1. Anonymous26 September 2006 at 07:41

    I know where you're coming from. Sie is an odd word in German, though - as I remember, it can also mean "you" or "they" - and that fact that it's used for different meanings in different contexts means its use in this context bothers me less.

    I was generally surprised how little the use of "sie" in Shock annoyed me. Usually, it's exactly the sort of thing that would get in the way of me enjoying a book, but I found it was OK.

    Graham

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  2. Stefan / 1of326 September 2006 at 22:53

    They should have asked a native German speaker before, if they really wanted a neutral pronoun.

    The way it is used in English (I'm in no position to decide whether sie is English or not) makes my internal grammar take it for female.

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  3. Victor Gijsbers27 September 2006 at 10:30

    You read books about knights, sure. But you don't read Bücher about Ritter, and you certainly wouldn't choose the word 'Buch' to be a neutral intermediate between 'book' and 'movie', would you? :)

    The problem is not that 'sie' is an English word that looks like a foreign word. I mean, "Coffee is good" looks a lot like "Kaffee ist gut" or "Koffie is goed", and this is not a problem at all.

    What is a problem is that if you create a new term as an intermediate between two previous terms, you should not use a word that in a closely related language translates to one of those two previous terms.

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  4. Stefan / 1of327 September 2006 at 12:49

    Right.

    I had a look at Wikipedia, too. What about "ey" or "thon"?

    Those are beautiful words.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous27 September 2006 at 13:27

    Now: it sounds like a German word with a similar meaning?

    No, not "similar", but the exact meaning you wish to avoid. The problem isn't that it's a real word, but it's the word you didn't want to use in the first place.

    "Zie" is too kooky, but "hir" isn't?

    ReplyDelete

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