Re: "Gender-free masculine pronoun"? Absurd. [was: Re: Crossposting[was: Re: Traditional gender-free "he" [was: Re: "16 and 276 are 292"?No. [was: Re: Lack of vocabulary in English?]]]]

From: Ross Howard (gguiri_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 03/17/05 

Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2005 11:58:56 +0100

On Thu, 17 Mar 2005 09:31:04 -0000, the Omrud <usenet.omrud@gmail.com>
wrought:

>Ross Howard had it:
>
>> The only [rats] I've ever seen, four or five during my ten years in
>> London, were all scurrying* along the third rail in tube stations,
>> probably saying "Don't try this at home".
>>
>> * ObAUE: I doubted between "scurry" and "scuttle" there. Opinions?
>
>I was on the tube two days ago, but I didn't see any rats. I think
>the choice between scurry and scuttle depends on the movement.
>Scurrying is rapid and purposeful. Scuttle has a little of the air
>of there being less of a rush, and somehow indicates a less direct
>movement forward.
>
>Quite why a rat would be either in a hurry, or not in a hurry, I
>can't imagine, other than to get out of the way of a train, for which
>it could presumably just fall of the rail.

Good point. They never seem to just saunter or mosey, do they?

Back to scurrying and scuttling, though -- don't you think it could
have something to do with rats having very short legs relative to
their shoulder height? In other words, might "scurry" and "scuttle"
not be antonyms of sorts for "lope" and "stride"?

Now opening this up a bit, I vaguely remember reading somewhere that
English has more verbs for different types of gaits than any other
major language. Not legendary Eskimo snow diversity, perhaps, but
still a hell of a lot. In fact, my familiarity with Spanish made me
realise that we don't just walk with more variety; there are lots more
"human body doing stuff" verbs in general compared with Spanish, which
tends to modify a small number of basic verbs with adverbs. (For
example, for "stare" the best they can do is the rather lame "look
fixedly".) 

--
Ross Howard