Word: pronouns
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...West Germany's biggest federal employer (480,000 workers), to start three-day courses in better behavior for its counter clerks. Among the lessons: no grimacing or staring; keep a "friendly, open facial expression"; "nod your head to show approval and consent"; avoid use of the insultingly familiar pronoun du. So far, about 15,000 of 30,000 postal counter clerks have taken the etiquette course. Reports a post office official: "It's going well; the clerks are really friendlier afterward...
However, says Princeton Theological Seminary's Bruce Metzger, chairman of the Revised Standard Version committee, "we are not going to change references to God where the masculine pronoun is in the text. We fool ourselves if we launder the language. We cannot rewrite history." Nor, it seems, is there any intention of rewriting the opening of the Lord's Prayer-or calling it something else...
...days when Alcide de Gasperi was the D.C. leader and autocratic Pope Pius XII threatened to excommunicate all Italians who voted Communist, the Vatican is taking a more overt part in an Italian campaign. Addressing a national conference of bishops last month, Pope Paul VI used the personal pronoun I instead of the pontifical we to stress his interest in the election. He obliquely exhorted Catholic voters to remain united behind the traditional Catholic party. At a weekly audience, Paul used Christ's post-resurrection words to his apostles, "Remain, remain in my love"-a not terribly subtle appeal...
Effective January 1 this year has been a new Senate rule, aimed to tighten the restriction of newsletter content to legislative rather than "political" matters. Personal references to a senator--his name, any personal pronoun or the ubiquitous "The Senator"--now are limited to no more than five per page. Predictably, this limit surprised a number of Senate press secretaries, especially those accustomed to a writing style peppered with phrases like "I believe that..." and "I have sponsored a bill that would...." The Senate Select Committee on Standards and Conduct ("The Ethics Committee") agreed to this new rule last November...
...Kalamazoo Public Schools. After studying twelve readers for Grades 1 through 6, the committee filed a complaint with the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. The complaint alleges, among other charges, that 80% of the leading characters in the reading series are boys or men, that the pronoun "she" is not introduced in the pre-primer series until the third volume, that women are "portrayed predominately as mothers, nurses, librarians, storekeepers...