Abstract
Paul W. Skerritt, Joondalup Community Mental Health, North Metropolitan Health Service, Perth, Australia:
Gender is a grammatical term and sex is a biological one. They began to get mixed up with each other a generation ago. Now the word gender has taken exclusive possession of the description of the sex of an individual in the usage of many people, particularly in the healing professions. The reason, if I recall, had something to do with the difficult task of describing the status of people whose Barr bodies declared one sex and their inclination or even belief suggested another.
Sex, the word, can refer, as we used to know, to the act of copulation or the designation of the participant, actual or eligible. The reticence to use the word sex in one of its two rightful ways is one of the many paradoxes of our age. The ambivalence about sex in the age of permissiveness is such that the word sex has become taboo when everyone is supposed to be doing it according to the popular culture of television and magazines. The tabloid press has tits and bums on page three. On page one, there are threats of impeachment, loss of the succession or the breakdown of public morals if presidents or royalty conduct the same sexual behaviour that they have done for centuries.
Psychiatrists and their allies talk about sex to their patients all the time. Is it a manifestation of the same ambivalence that the use of the word must be minimised to at least half by substitution of the inferior and inaccurate term, gender?
I was at a case conference recently when there was some uncertainty about the sex of one of the drama – tis personae of the scenario that was unfolding. It was the word ‘gender’ that was in use when one of the participants declared: ‘Well it has to be one gender or the other!’.
Wrong! In English there are three genders, as there are in Latin, Greek and German. In French and Italian, indeed, there are only two but in English we have the masculine, the feminine and the neuter genders. The substitution of the grammatical word, gender, for the biological one, sex, has contributed to the neuter gender being disregarded and forgotten.
Many words in regular use in psychiatry are examples of the neuter gender in Latin. They are mostly recognised by the suffix −um. These words take the plural in Latin by changing the suffix to −a. Herein lies the problem. We usually associate the suffix −a in Latin and often in English with the feminine gender, which takes the plural by changing the ending to −ae. (Adding an −s in the English plural manner to any gender is often preferable). There are even some masculine words that do this in Latin. Agricola and nauta are curious examples. We can wonder why the farmer and the sailor found themselves with their common nouns in the feminine form. Our own patron saint, St Luke, patron of physicians because of a throw-away comment in the epistle of Paul to the Collossians (4:14), had the same problem. His name in Latin is in the feminine form Luca when his mother or the writers of the New Testament could have used masculine forms of Lucus, Lucius or Lucanus, which were all in use at the time.
Most of the confusing Latin neuter words are nouns which are thus the names of things, as the neuter gender indicates. One of the commonest in and out of medicine is ‘the media’. It is the plural of the word ‘medium’, something in the middle. ‘The press’ as a collective noun became less useful when it became only one medium of mass communication which had to jostle with several other media for its place at the interviews and its share of the market. How confusing is the use of ‘the media’. One can argue that it has become a collective noun and assumed a feminine singular form without a plural, a manoeuvre that the versatile English language can take in its stride. But the usage is so often clearly in the plural sense yet the expression is ‘the media is’ rather than ‘the media are’. The same principle can apply to culture media in microbiology. In the same specialty, bacterium as the singular and bacteria as the plural are often confused by the news media.
Another increasingly misused neuter Latin noun is forum. It literally means a marketplace but in Roman times was the place for the practice of politics, the law and many other forms of communication. Our own Carl Friederich von Westphal used the Greek equivalent agora (αγoρα) in his invention of the term agoraphobia. I have noticed that someone in the ABC began using the Latin plural, fora, a rather ugly word, when the English plural forums does the job perfectly well. Soon confusion spread through the ABC as fora became used as a singular and I even heard the word ‘foras’ on one occasion. I am still waiting for ‘forae’. Another word of the neuter gender having a similar usage is symposium, which has a far more interesting literal meaning in Greek of a get together for the purpose of drinking. People seem to have trouble with its neuter plural as well, referring to ‘a symposia’. Maybe it would be safer to stick to another synonym in English, seminar, from the Latin semen for seed, but I have once had to spring to the defence of a distinguished woman psychiatrist subjected to sexist comments from fellow psychiatrists about this derivation.
Some of the misused neuter forms are past participles. The commonest in psychiatric writing is data, the past participle, neuter of the verb dare, to give. Datum is a thing given and data are things given. Most editors of scientific journals will root out any clause such as ‘the data is’, but it is heard frequently elsewhere. Is there an instinct that regards the word as a singular collective noun as media has supposed to have become?
Still more of our misused neuters have originated in Greek. Your literate Roman of the classical age writing in the Latin language did not feel compelled to incorporate words from the Greek in which he would also have been literate. Some found their way into Latin much later than the classical period and found hospitality in the neuter gender. Two favourites in psychiatry whose plurals are often abused are criterion (κριτηριov) and phenomenon (ϕαιvoμεvov), which take their Latin neuter plurals correctly as criteria and phenomena. One hears the plural of both used so often as the singular, ‘a criteria’ or ‘a phenomena’ and, worse, the plurals as ‘criterias’ and ‘phenomenas’. It sometimes seems that the only correct singular popular use is the name of the pub in Hay Street, Perth, ‘The Criterion’ and doubtless another hundred similar hostelries around Australia.
We could run through the Latin gerundives in common use such as corrigenda, memoranda, propaganda, referring to things that require correcting, remembering or propagating. All are neuter plurals and all are often misused. Is it worth worrying about? If the general gist of the communication gets through, does the use of expressions like ‘the criterias’ or ‘the data is…’ really matter?
There is a school of educational thought which has resulted in our children being kept in ignorance of the grammar of their language on the grounds that, if it communicates the idea, it is alright. There are two objections to this approach. One is that violations of the logic of our grammar such as using a plural subject to a singular verb does identify poor writing even to those who must rely on their instincts rather than a knowledge of grammar. The other is the potential for contradiction and confusion when rules regarded as unnecessary are broken. An example is whether one medium, criterion or forum is being referred to or more than one. Sometimes the number will change within a sentence with an inevitable confusion if only the plural version of the word is used.
But most of all, as psychiatrists whose predecessors brought the study of sex out into the open, we should not join in the prissiness that avoids the very use of the word sex and the substitution of the inferior one, gender, with its consequent confusion of grammatical usage in the very plurality that sex demands.