(2 of 2)
The problem restated by this book is more than a joke and less than a na tional crisis. To their credit, the authors usually hover somewhere between these extremes. They admit that social attitudes cannot be changed overnight simply by inventing words. But even such terms as "Ms" and "chairperson" they insist, really do help meet needs created by the growing independence and authority of women. Many people (not all of them men) would rather scrape their fingernails across a blackboard than hear such ugly and artificial neologisms especially when they are propounded on the unproved assumption that it will do some public good. But most new words seem awkward at first. Over the centuries the ones that survive do so only because they are useful—and the useful ones sound better as the years go by.
Paul Gray