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In the philosophy of semantics there is a standard rhetorical question: Is it progress if a cannibal eats with a knife and fork? Similarly, if society is sexist, is it altered when its language is revised? Or do its attitudes remain when its platitudes change? The prognosis is not good. Words, like all currency, need to be reinforced with values. Take away the Federal Reserve and its dollar bill is waste paper. Take away meaning and a word is only noise. Changing chairman to chairperson is mock doctrine and flaccid democracy, altering neither the audience nor, in fact, the office holder. Despite its suffix, chairman is no more sexist than the French designation of "boat" as masculine, or the English custom of referring to a ship with feminine pronouns. Chairman is a role, not a pejorative. Congressman is an office, not a chauvinist plot. Mankind is a term for all humanity, not some 49% of it. The feminist attack on social crimes may be as legitimate as it was inevitable. But the attack on words is only another social crime—one against the means and the hope of communication.
For A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess created a wall-to-wall nightmare in which society dissolves into violence and repression. The condition is reflected in the breakdown of language into "nadsat," a jumble of portmanteau constructions ("He looked a malenky bit poogly when he viddied the four of us"). To Burgess, language is the breath of civilization. Cut it short and society suffocates. That is an insight worth pondering. For if the world is to resist the nadsat future, readers and writers of both sexes must resist onefully any meaningless neologisms. To do less is to encourage another manifestation of prejudice—against reason, meaning and eventually personkind itself.