Epicene pronouns, Swedish edition

The NYT has a piece this morning with this headline:

Swedish School’s Big Lesson Begins With Dropping Personal Pronouns

 Here's the opening:

At an ocher-color preschool along a lane in Stockholm’s Old Town, the teachers avoid the pronouns “him” and “her,” instead calling their 115 toddlers simply “friends.” Masculine and feminine references are taboo, often replaced by the pronoun “hen,” an artificial and genderless word that most Swedes avoid but is popular in some gay and feminist circles.

So, it's not about DROPPING personal pronouns, but rather avoiding gendered language. We've talked about epicene pronouns before (e.g. here), and other linguablogs have too.

Here's my question: Is this the clearest institutional endorsement of the phenomenon? I'm not recalling anything quite like it offhand. You could actually end up with kids using such forms pretty much natively, I suppose.

Blobology and neurosexism

I first learned of Cordelia Fine's new book, DELUSIONS OF GENDER: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, on the Log a while back, but have only now read a couple of reviews (and I'm not likely to read the book. But let me quote from Wray Herbert's review in the Washington Post:

About halfway through this irreverent and important book, cognitive psychologist Cordelia Fine offers a fairly technical explanation of the fMRI, a common kind of brain scan. By now, everyone is familiar with these head-shaped images, with their splashes of red and orange and green and blue. But far fewer know what those colors really mean or where they come from.

It's not as if these machines are taking color videos of the human brain in action -- not even close. In fact, these high-tech scanners are gathering data several steps removed from brain activity and even further from behavior. They are measuring the magnetic quality of hemoglobin, as a proxy for the blood oxygen being consumed in particular regions of the brain. If the measurement is different from what one would expect, scientists slap some color on that region of the map: hot, vibrant shades such as red if it's more than expected; cool, subdued tones if it's less.

Fine calls this "blobology": the science -- or art -- of creating images and then interpreting them as if they have something to do with human behavior. Her detailed explanation of brain-scanning technology is essential to her argument, as it conveys a sense of just how difficult it is to interpret such raw data. She isn't opposed to neuroscience or brain imaging; quite the opposite. But she is ardently against making authoritative interpretations of ambiguous data.

Now, heck, maybe I will read this book. Anyway, I sure like that attitude. I had heard blobology before, I'm pretty sure (and it gets a good set of g-hits). But only now does it strike me as filling a really big lexical gap in scientific vocabulary: We've got ways of referring to the gross over-interpretation of shaky evidence, but nothing nearly so catchy as blobology.

I don't know if it's Word of the Year material, yet, but I say we start using it.

Image from here.

New frontiers in the science of language: "Millions of words a day"

Gee, maybe we don't have enough language blogging going on. Last night, I heard Hillary Clinton, in her efforts to untangle herself from the Tuzla mess, say this (quoting from here, which matches my recollection):

I think that, a minor blip, you know, if I said something that, you know, I say a lot of things – millions of words a day – so if I misspoke, that was just a misstatement.

Now, I've waited almost 24 hours before posting on this, figuring the big dogs over at the Log would jump on it as a logical follow-up to Mark Liberman'sexcellent posts last year about Brizendine on gender differences. These included claims how women were alleged to speak much more than men. The whole 'talkativeness' thread over there was relevant, but this post gives this Brizendine claim about gender and words-per-day:

A woman uses about 20,000 words per day while a man uses about 7,000.

If Senator Clinton was being accurate in her self-assessment (and we linguists know that this can be a problem on occasion), and if the plural is just barely right (i.e., if she uses 2,000,000 wpd [= words per day]), she is speaking as much as 100 women at Brizendine's rate. More impressively, that comes to 286 man-wpd.

Seriously, I think this resolves the question of the empirical basis of Brizendine's work: Most or even all other females can speak exactly as many words as men on a daily basis. Brizendine's sample happened to include Clinton, and Brizendine failed to exclude her as an outlier, which skewed the numbers to this degree. Looks to me like a sample size of 150 per gender would get you about this result: 149 women uttering 7,000 wpd + Clinton's 2,000,000 would yield 20,287 wpd. That would be one solid sample, you'd think, save for the outlier. Wonder what the standard deviation came to for the other 149?

Wow. But I like the sentiment in the image (from here) better.