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Thursday, November 1, 2007 12:00 AM

Boys against girl?

The Clinton campaign accuses the men of piling on.

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  • Thursday, November 1, 2007 08:46 AM

    I endorse...

    ...the comments made by AKA Smith and MizBinkley. Our language and culture prefer gendered pronouns and descriptors. If we see a group of men standing together, we say "there's a group of guys over there." Likewise with a group of women. We tend not to say "there's a group of people over there."

    Sure, it's possible that the Clinton campaign is trying to use the girl defense, but they also don't have much choice in terms of words to use. As others have pointed out, using gender-neutral terms is actually unnatural in our somewhat gender-specific language.

    On the other hand, at least we don't speak French or Spanish or any of the scores of other languages that would point out, with almost every single adjective used to describe her, that she's a woman.

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