Sally Pipes has an article on gender neutral language — which isn’t a bad idea but, like all things, gets absurd when taken to extremes — that begins with this hilarious anecdote from a recent National Public Radio broadcast,
Last month NASA ended the career of the Galileo space probe by smashing it into Jupiter. As a reporter on National Public Radio noted, Galileo was an “unpersonned” space craft. Only language was injured.
An “unmanned” spacecraft would, of course, be accurate but not politically correct. This sort of nonsense proceeds from militant feminism, which sees gender bias lurking on every hand, and regards the English language as an instrument of repression. The extent to which this ideology has permeated educational institutions is evident in The Language Police, a recent book by historian Diane Ravitch.
Source:
Language Police Brutality. Sally Pipes, Pacific Research Institute, October 2003.