Gender-specific terminology and Michael Milken - 21 December 1990

Before I left California, the mayor of Los Angeles issued nothing less than an edict ordering Angelenos at any rate, to cease and desist from their normal usage of normal words that have been used without shame or malice aforethought for centuries.

The actual order issuing from the office of Mayor Tom Bradley, went in the first place to the heads of the various departments of the city government and directed them, quote, "to eliminate sex-specific terminology from position titles, equipment and official correspondence", unquote.

It must have taken somebody quite a time to work out the categories – position titles and equipment. Equipment, for one, is a word that since well before Ernest Hemingway, has had a precise meaning that to be understood, required you to concentrate on gender. However, the word that offended Mayor Bradley and one he wants abolished from all official usage is the humble word, manhole. Is that particularly offensive?

You bet, it has the prefix man and Mayor Bradley has joined the most square-jawed wing of the feminist movement, in trying to rid our language of every mention of man where the word has been taken to include all of humanity.

Mankind obviously is out, humankind, fine. Manhole, in all notices emerging from the city government of Los Angeles, will henceforth be called maintenance hole.

Mayor Bradley makes quite clear why he regards the ancient and regular usage as obnoxious, in fact he says that people, you and I probably, who use man in reference that include humanity as a whole, are guilty of the most subtle form of sexism.

Now what are position titles? They're old friends or enemies, according to prejudice. The first one that made oldsters like me punishable, was chairman. When I first came to this country, I picked up the going usage, Madam chairwoman for, guess what, a woman.

All that was banned, oh, it must be 20, more years ago, shortly after Betty Friedan published her historic, or should I say seminal, work on feminism, The Feminine Mystique. Since then it's been almost compulsory in this country to salute the chairperson, especially if she's a woman.

For some reason I've never discovered, it is thought indelicate or sexist to refer to what is a fact, namely that she is a female. Mayor Bradley added to chairperson, which he hopes will replace at all times, chairman and chairwoman, he added a ban on fireman, policeman and workman. Henceforth in Los Angeles, they must be called and described as fire-fighter, police officer and worker.

This little list by no means takes care of the offending usages. The mayor urges all city officials to reword sentences in order to eliminate unnecessary gender pronouns and replace them with, for instance, one. Now Americans have never been comfortable with the old genteel English usage, "One feels very chilly when one's caught in a north wind, doesn't one?" But Mayor Bradley may have brought it back. It's going to be bizarre to hear John McEnroe saying, "Oh one finds at my age that after losing two sets, one has a rough time recovering one's nerve".

Of course there remain whole rafts of words which have man either as a prefix or a suffix. Manpower, journeyman, the whole strenuous minuet, this teetering and high-stepping round the natural movement of language reached a peak of absurdity a few years ago when a lady on Long Island, recently divorced, applied to the courts to have her name changed.

She had, of course, according to the immemorial, detestable usage, acquired her husband's name. She was known as, say, it's close enough, Helen Cooperman. She asked to change it to, wait for it, Helen Cooperperson. The judge said, ridiculous, pretty soon the old song will have to be sung, "Woodsperson spare that tree".

He dismissed her case but she persisted, she moved onwards and upwards to a higher court and this time the judge granted her wish. He asked her also if she wished to change the name of her son, Johnny Cooperman. No, she said gravely, he should keep it. I'd like to think he could preserve his male identity. Bully for Johnny.

Two phrases, one a technical phrase, the other the slang equivalent, have been heard so much of lately that they almost signify a new way of life for the '90s. Chapter 11 and belly up.

Chapter 11 is the required part of a federal code that you must follow to file for bankruptcy. When a business goes belly up, it means the same thing. According to the most plausible explanation, belly up derives from the appearance of dead animals, I'm told or dead fish, I'm certain floating downstream belly up because the theory goes, an air pocket has formed in their stomachs.

However that may be, I have seen fish belly up hundreds of times, in my old fishing days, before the demon golf got me and they were certainly dead and gone, if not bankrupt. But I've heard belly up in talk and read Chapter 11 in print, more often in the past year than in the whole decade of the 1980s.

Of course the 1980s were the decade that made all the money, which would unaccountably be lost in the 1990s. I ran into an old friend the other night, who for many years has been the chief trustee of a charitable foundation, founded in the long ago by one of those American fat cats, who in middle age, disposes of much of his financial adipose tissue, in a worthy cause, in this case the cause of poor boys and girls struggling for an education.

Well, I said, by way of greeting, how are the foundations doing? His usual rosy smile faded fast. Very badly, he said. How come? We're discovering, he said dolefully, that October 1987 was true. That, you may recall was the, the date of the 500-odd point fall in the stock market, from which, at the time, we all noticed how vigorously we'd recovered.

Well, whether it's the late long shadow of that October that's darkening our bank deposits, or the belated but general recognition that the federal deficit is cause for alarm, or the prospect of adding another 15 or 30 billions to it, to pay for the adventure in the Gulf, or whether, as the southern fundamentalists believe, God is asserting his Old Testament habits and is punishing the wicked, the facts are before us every day.

Michael Milken, the genius of the junk bond, is on his way to gaol. The name of Robert Campo is not a daily item recording yet another breath-taking takeover. Mr Donald Trump, the Phineas T Barnum of the casinos, has been restricted to a monthly allowance by his bankers. Other world-renowned tycoons are reported every other day, renegotiating to reschedule billions of dollars of debt.

The head of the federal institution that insures individual bank deposits up to $100,000 – if the bank goes bust and you have $100,000 in it in your name, the government will recompense you, if you have $200,000 there you lose 100,000.

Well, this benign old man whose appearance on television at congressional hearings makes us feel so comfortable, so reassured, he assured us the other day that the government fund that covers a bank's losses when it goes belly up, the fund is running low.

High enough to cushion a mild recession, but he said if there's a severe recession – everybody's scared stiff of using the word depression – then the government can't possibly live up to its promise of repayment. Many hundreds of banks would go bankrupt. He did say, incidentally, that with things as they are now, several scores, I think over a hundred, banks will go bankrupt in the next year.

And then, on the evening news, we hear it seems like once a week, about a big airline that has been swallowed up like Jonah, so it won't go belly up, and a couple of regional airlines, quite big ones, that have filed under Chapter 11. Gone, dead, bankrupt.

But then, the commentator says, however, operations will continue as usual. Both airlines are flying their regular daily schedule. They've only been losing a couple of million dollars a day. Some bank is seeing to it that they can borrow 40, 60, 100 million, to see if they can come through, by what miraculous means is never indicated, into the spring.

I am open mouthed, aghast at all these goings on. I speak as an outsider, who has been watching politicians and economists and bankers for more decades than I now care to count and what strikes me – it may well demonstrate my adorable naiveté – what strikes me, is a new note, a totally new attitude.

In my day, bankruptcy was a disgrace. You vanished from sight and were kept going by kindly charitable friends, while society frowned and creditors cursed. But today, bankruptcy has become the decent thing to do, the gallant, manly way out of a mess. Mr Donald Trump's enforced monthly allowance would be to you and me, a windfall, a bonanza, making us affluent for life.

Only last week, there was an advertisement in the San Francisco evening paper. It said, come clean, make a fresh start, start bankruptcy proceedings now under our friendly guidance, call and the friendly telephone number. I have discovered, after all these years, that debt is the prudent thing to live on, that when Benjamin Franklin said, neither a lender nor a borrower be, he was an old fuddy-duddy.

I've also come to believe that the only sentence I ever recall from the only economics lecture I ever attended, was not – as I thought at the time – a wicked little joke, but the controlling principle of economic life.

It was in 1929. I attended a lecture at King's College, Cambridge, given by one John Maynard Keynes and all I remember his saying was, if you owe the Bank of England a hundred pounds and skip the country, they will track you down and put you in prison. If you owe them a million pounds, they'll put you on the board.

So, a merry Christmas and a happy, debt-ridden, New Year.

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