West Point's Alma Mater
West Point is considering changing their Alma Mater, which refers to 'men' and 'boys', to use more gender neutral language.
I graduated from Georgia Tech. Our Alma Mater begins: "Oh Sons of Tech, arise behold". Personally, I would be offended if Tech changed its alma mater. And, really, what could they change it to? It would completely mess up the rhythm to say "Oh Children" or "Oh Men and Women", etc. West Point would change 'sons' to corps and 'men' to ranks. I doubt that would fly at Tech. They've already changed the traditional title of Tech freshmen from RAT (Recruit at Tech - referring to our heritage as a military school) to RATS (Recently Acquired Tech Student - because, ya know, 'recruit' was too offensive).
If this flies at West Point, I bet it will be only a matter of time before Tech does something, too.
Blegh. I hate all this PC stuff.
Categories:
politics and junk and stuff
Ugh. I hate pc-talk and "inclusive language". My darling sister had points docked in her college philosophy class for refusing to use gender neutral language in her papers. Mad as she was, she thought it was hilarious that her *male* prof was making such a big deal about a *female* student not being "gender inclusive".
I remember we used to go to this liberal Mennonite church where they were agonzing over the horrible male-domination of the hymn book, and wanted to reprint the book entirely gender neutral, including excising male references to God!
I can't remember which version it is, but there's now a gender-neutral translation of the bible. Really silly, IMO. People can waste so much time and effort being offended over things that just don't matter.
Ewokgirl,
I think there are several Bible translations that have gender-neutral terms. I know for a fact that the New Living Translation sometimes says "Brothers and sisters." According to Wikipedia, the Today's NIV and Contemporary English Version (among others) have terms like this.