Next Noble Pen Meeting

Jan 7th, 2016 at 7 pm

Scott’s Family Restaurant

1906 Blairs Ferry Rd NE, Cedar Rapids

News

No news is good news.

Victories

We all made it into a new year.  We’ll have to wait until the meeting to find out what literary victories everyone had.

Education

As our culture changes, so do the words.  Gender neutral language has been slowly gaining usage since the introduction of Ms for a female with unspecified marital status and flight attendant instead of stewardess.

English has an easier path to gender neutrality than languages such as Spanish where even inanimate objects have gender and use “el” and “la” instead of “the.”  As such, English may be considered genderless.

Yet English is short on neutral pronouns and nouns.  We can say “person” instead of “man” or “woman”, or “server” instead of “waiter,” but traditionally we were stuck with “him” and “her.”  A recent trend is to substitute “they” as a reference to one man or woman, which would have been considered poor grammar in past times. New pronouns have been proposed.

Here’s the Wikipedia summary of the topic, another discussion, and a guide from a college.

Upcoming Schedule

Jan 7
Randy
Nick

Jan 14
Bill W.
Aime W.

Jan 21
Open slots

Jan 28
Open slots

Feb 4
Open slots

Keep Writing,
Bill