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Letters to the
Editor
Dear Sam, Your article, "Real Men Don't Say Spritz" was very educational and helps me to understand women. But, you didn't touch on the really big issue which is the toilet seat. Why is it a felony for a man to leave the seat up? There must be some historical background. Did the inventor, John Crapper have a psychotic wife? Did the Queen of England not approve of the invention? Was Crapper knighted or was he executed for his noble invention? Perhaps one of your readers has the answer. —Bob Link
Wikipedia has an interesting article that cites Thomas Crapper as being involved in the development and marketing of the flush toilet. Here's my opinion about the toilet seat controversy. Either.... 1.a woman can leave the seat up for him when she's finished and he can leave it down for her when he's finished, or 2.she can lower it when she needs it lowered and he can raise it when he needs it raised. Any such arrangement is fair and equitable. If a woman refuses such an arrangement then she isn't trying to keep the toilet seat down. She's trying to control his behavior. —editor
Hi Sam, Your "Real Men Don't Say Spritz" article hit several nails on the head for me. Just before I read it my wife came home and after discovering that I had washed several days of dirty dishes that had been scattered all over the kitchen, she thanked me. Idiot that I am, I suggested that it might be a better idea to wash the dishes just after getting them dirty. Her response was a tantrum, refusal to discuss the issue and several hours of silent treatment. Thank you, —Steve; Mililani, Hawaii
Here's a joke that I heard somewhere. No husband has ever been shot by his wife while he was washing the dishes. —editor
I thought you were going to talk about language [Real Men Don't Say Spritz —editor] but I'll write back to you anyway. Recently listened to a audiotape from TTC about the evolution of English. To native English speakers having a female table or trouble or a pencil that is a male seems foolish to us. Thank Odin that the Vikings stripped Britain of all that nonsense. Except for one instance: the third person singular. He/she is an odious attempt at grammar neutrality. Perhaps it's time to borrow a neutral term from another language. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutrality_in_genderless_languages; "Estonian word ta (or tema) is gender-neutral and means both "she" and "he". There are many other examples on that page. I feel sorry for folks who are stuck in a language where everything has a gender. Language shapes the thoughts and feelings of a person. For instance; saying 'No problemo' would get a native Puerto Rican male all riled up because — trouble is always a woman — it's 'No problema'. It was disappointing that your article was just another rant about women being giving carte blanche to ride roughshod on men. Sometimes humor can defuse a situation such as when some bitch says "take it like a man" you can return with a snappy answer to a snide remark such as "use some grease if I'm getting fucked over." Here's my thing on ready retorts for snarky snide remarks: my net name is ptosis. http://ptosis.hubpages.com/hub/VerbalDefense —ptosis
I suspect that your hypothetical Puerto Rican man might not use "no problema" very often. He'd probably have more use for either "no problemo" or "mucha problema", which just goes to show how handy it can be to have a gender specific capability in a language. Gender neutral terms are also useful. In the English language, we don't have just "he" and "she". We also have "it", although a woman might be miffed if a man referred to her that way. The typically stupid feminist answers to that dilemma, the terms "he/she" and "s/he", are, as I noted, typically stupid. The generic sense of "he" works just fine, so long as there aren't any rabid feminists in the vicinity.
Tables, pencils, and so forth don't have gender significance and it's usually although not always silly for a language to apply gender significance to such items. Males and females do have gender significance and it's appropriate that a language should recognize and express that gender significance. To strip gender specific terms from the English language
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would be to diminish the language.
With regard to the consequences of that, I suggest the Wikipedia article
Newspeak.
Regarding some of the various peculiarities of our language, you might
be interested in my essay The
Ravings of a Mad Man, in which I invented the term nononym. Also
see Milam's
Dictionary of Distinctions, Differences, and other Odds and Ends.
They're both available on Pharos.
In "Real Men Don't Say Spritz", I wrote about usage, which is indeed, a part of language. The usages that I mentioned are based on well established patterns of behavior. The comment about a woman scorned goes back at least to 1697, when it was used by William Congreve in The Mourning Bride. He might have turned that particular phrase but he didn't invent the idea. That idea transcends both time and language, and can be traced at least as far back as 411 B.C., where it was mentioned by Aristophanes, in Lysistrata.
I wouldn't be surprised if the idea goes all the way back to the Neanderthal women, who were probably just as "mucha problema" as modern women are. If you're disappointed in my "rant" about the behavior of women, then imagine how tired I am of women complaining about the behavior of men. I'm only writing a newsletter and I don't force anybody to read it. The woman have turned their complaints into a systematic program of political repression that's mandatory on all of us. My article was a credible discussion of observed patterns of behavior and was far less obnoxious than is the feminists’ calculated programs of sexual entrapment and subsequent punishment. Finally, with regard to such behavior, I also have two short stories. They might be more entertaining for you than my "rants". They are Lady's Man and The Fable of the Woman Who Cried Wolf. They're both available on my personal website. I took a look at your article, referenced in your message above, about people who accuse us of causing our own problems by the choices that we make. Here are a few of my thoughts on that subject. If a person's choices are sufficiently reduced before he has the opportunity to make them, then he can be forced to do by choice anything that is desired of him, however onerous it might be. Consider that a man will choose to jump from the top of a burning building. You don't have to push him but that doesn't mean that he wanted to do it. He does it because he's driven to it by a lack of better choices. Jumping is the best available option. So, is it by choice that a man is in an impoverished situation and is begging for food? Maybe. Was there a better option? Maybe not. The government might already have reduced his options, in advance, to either begging for food or submitting to slavery. The elimination of options is one of the primary functions of government, and one of its most effective weapons of control. —editor
Gendervision Sam Aurelius Milam III In his letter to the editor last month, Frank, of San Jose, California, reported his observations of gender bias on the television. In my editorial reply, I noted some examples of my own. The letter to the editor from ptosis, above, prompted me to continue in that vein. I saw another example of gender bias, or at least of gender myopia, on a recent rerun of NCIS. A nubile young female was wearing her skirt all the way up to her butt and, in public, she was bending over a table. She was putting on quite a show. When she looked around and saw that McGee was watching her, she was ready to claw his eyes out for staring. What did she expect? If she's going to dress like that and then stick her ass out, men are going to stare. Maybe women don't notice it when other women do things like that, but men notice it. We're the ones who're accused of sexual harassment when, as in the NCIS episode, we're actually the victims of the sexual entrapment scams that women routinely perpetrate. It's one of the ways in which they try to control us. Then there's that Zaxby's Big Zax Snack Meal commercial where the woman walks up and slaps Clay Matthews on the butt. It's clear from the dialog that, in the scenario, the two were not previously acquainted, but he "takes it like a man" anyway. With commendable courtesy, he even offers her a bite of his snack meal. What do you suppose would happen if he had slapped her on the butt? I expect that the network would be inundated by shrieks of outrage from the feminazis. Gender bias is alive and well on the television.
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Acknowledgments My thanks to the following: SantaClara Bob; Lady Jan the Voluptuous; my mother; Dewey and Betty; Bob Link; and Joseph, of Northridge, California. — editor
Useful Units of Measure Original Source Unknown. Forwarded by David, of Idaho Falls, Idaho.
Statements Attributed to Al Gore Original Source Unknown. Forwarded by Lady Jan the Voluptuous. I didn't try to verify any of them.
Frontiersman Subscriptions and Past Issues — Printed copies of this newsletter, either subscriptions or past issues, are available by application only. Cancellations — If you don't want to keep receiving this newsletter, then return it unopened. When I receive it, I'll terminate your subscription. Reprint Policy — Permission is hereby granted to reproduce this newsletter in its entirety or to reproduce material from it, provided that the reproduction is accurate and that proper credit is given. I do not have the authority to give permission to reprint material that I have reprinted from other sources. For that permission, you must go to the original source. I would appreciate receiving a courtesy copy of any document or publication in which you reprint my material. Submissions — I solicit letters, articles, and cartoons for the newsletter, but I don't pay for them. Short items are more likely to be printed. I suggest that letters and articles be shorter than 500 words but that's flexible depending on space available and the content of the piece. Payment — This newsletter isn't for sale. If you want to make a voluntary contribution, then I prefer cash or U.S. postage stamps. For checks or money orders, please inquire. For PayPal payments, use editor@frontiersman.org.uk. In case anybody's curious, I also accept gold, silver, platinum, etc. I don't accept anything that requires me to provide ID to receive it. — Sam Aurelius Milam III, editor
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