Notebook
Having been quoted not so long ago in the Guardian woman's page as an example of an anti-feminist (it has a column called 'Naked Ape' for exposing this sort of thing), I seized eagerly upon a paperback from The Women's Press called The Handbook of Non-Sexist Writing for Writers, Editors and Speakers. It is written by two Cheerful-looking, middle-aged American women called Casey Miller and Kate Swift Who are said to be experts on the subject of sexism and language. I found to my surprise that the book was neither quite as silly nor, unfortunately, as funny as I had anticipated. Linguistic sexism, as defined by Mses Miller and Swift, turns out in many cases to have less to do with the possible Prejudices of the writer or speaker than With everyday problems of clarity of expression. One common problem involves the use of pronouns. Even though Shakespeare, for example, wrote: 'God send everyone their heart's desire', we are normally taught in school that this is ungrammatical and that it should read 'God send everyone his heart's desire'. The masculine pronoun in such a context is said to be generally understood to include both sexes, but in fact few people feel comfortable with this concept and many would feel tempted to say 'his or her heart's desire', just to show that they had not forgotten about the needs of the female heart. I rather agree with Mses Miller and Swift that, to avoid both clumsiness and ambiguity, it would be preferable if one could use 'they' as a singular pronoun Without feeling one was committing a i howler. A whole chapter in the book s. about the use of the word 'man'. The word man', of course, means both an adult male and any old'human being, as in 'one man's meat is another man's poison'. But in this latter sense, it is still loaded in favour of the Male of the species, it being impossible to say, for example, that the first person to swim the Channel, if that person happened to be a woman, was the first 'man' to do so. On the whole the book shows that there are few solutions to this sort of problem that do not emasculate (to use an unfortunate word) the language. One cannot but laugh at the efforts, officially supported by the American government, to eliminate the suffixes 'man' or 'woman' from job titles — ,charworker for 'charwoman', ,houseworker' for 'maid', 'signaller' for signalman', and so on. And many of the `sexisms' of which feminists complain the use of the word 'lady' instead of 'Woman', headlines like 'Mrs Thatcher bashes Foot' instead of 'Thatcher bashes Foot' — are merely examples of good man ners. And manners, of course, , makyth man.
6 Tudges,' said Mrs Thatcher in the Com mons on Tuesday, 'give decisions on the law and the evidence before them. They do so totally impartially.' This was her confident reply to the claims of angry Labour MPs that Lord Denning and his fellow Appeal Court judges had exercised political judgment in deciding that the GLC had acted illegally by cutting London Transport fares. Well, I agree with her only up to a point. The decision that Mr Ken Livingstone had infringed the Transport (London) Act 1969 by failing to run London Transport on economic lines, and that he had no right disproportionately to reward transport users at the expense of the ratepayers, was no doubt an honest interpretation of the law. But Lord Denning certainly did, in explaining the Court's decision, make judgments of a political character. He struck, for example, right at the heart of the Labour Party debate by declaring that an election manifesto was not a 'covenant', and that 'many electors did not vote for the manifesto, they voted for the party'. Quite true, of course, but unnecessary of him to say so unless his aim was to stir political controversy. Lord Denning also pointed out that even if the GLC had acted legally, it would have been exercising its powers 'in an arbitrary and unfair' manner. Quite true again, but just as unnecessary to say so. I have sympathy with the demented Mr Livingstone. He is one of those who do believe that election manifestos are solemn and binding affairs, and he would have felt very guilty indeed if he had not tried to carry out the party's rash election promise on fares cuts. It also did not occur to him, in his haste to keep his promise, that he might have been acting illegally, and nobody seems to have bothered to warn him of the danger. Now he has an old judge in a wig telling him not only that he has broken the law and that the result will be utter chaos in the administration of London, but that his political ideas are misguided as well. No wonder he was looking so tired and miserable at his Tuesday press conference!
In an article in the Spectator last March, Bohdan Nahaylo drew attention to the double standards of the National Union of Mineworkers which, while taking ,up the causes of miners in Bolivia and Chile, refused to acknowledge the appalling illtreatment being received by miners in the Soviet Union. When a former Ukrainian coal miner, Vladimir Klebanov, tried in desperation to organise an independent trade union and was consequently confined to a psychiatric hospital, the NUM did look into his case. But when the official Soviet miners' union described Klebanov as a mere shirker and troublemaker, Mr Joe Gormley told his colleagues that 'there was no reason to doubt' the official line and that anyway the NUM should not 'flog a dead horse on behalf of an individual'. In the same article, Mr Nahaylo suggested that the NUM might like to reconsider its policy of silence in the light of the treatment of another Soviet miner, Alexei Nikitin. Nikitin has twice been locked up in a mental hospital, the first time for arguing with the authorities about workers' rights and the second time, in December last year, for getting in touch with two Western correspondents in order to attract publicity for the living conditions of Soviet coalminers. A few days ago it was reported from Moscow that Mr Nikitin is being forcibly treated with massive doses of drugs and is in danger of going blind. In September 1980 he was independently examined by a psychaitrist from Kharkov, Dr Anatoly Koryagin, who declared that he could find no symptoms of mental illness. Dr Koryagin was consequently arrested last February and is now reported to be in an isolation cell in a labour camp. In the face of such reports by respected Western correspondents in Moscow, the NUM should now be wondering whether there is still 'no reason to doubt' the assurances it gets from KGB officials. Perhaps it would like even to say something.
people often complain about the cost of weekly magazines nowadays. Indeed, even to me, 50 pence seems rather a lot to expect someone to pay for the Spectator. But the juxtaposition on last week's cover of the present price and that of our first issue of 1828 has prompted a reader to point out how very cheap in comparison the paper is today. The first issue cost nmepence. This was roughly equivalent at the time to one day's pay for a farm labourer. Today a farm labourer gets about £16. a day. One could also make a comparison with the cost of milk. For 50 pence today, you can get about 21/2 pints of milk. For ninepence in 1828, you could probably get about 36 pints of milk. This is just to encourage those people who are still wondering whether to take out subscriptions.
Alexander Chancellor
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