Grammatical Sex

How did the word gender come to mean sex ? A statistical table the other day sorted data by “gender,” and the “gender gap” was much discussed a season ago, until Ronald Reagan demolished it at the polls--a political change that obscured a linguistic one. But few object to the growing misuse of the word gender , which comes from grammar and has to do with masculine and feminine nouns, in languages that make that distinction, not with men and women. That distinction is properly called sex , a word whose physical overtones apparently force many speakers to adopt the euphemism gender .

We once had a foreign-language teacher who intoned, “Adjectives and nouns must agree in gender and number.” English nouns do not have gender, which may contribute to English speakers’ not having a clear idea of what the word means. Even in the grammatical sense gender is not identical to sex. According to the Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage by Bergen Evans (Random House), “In Old English, which had three genders, wife was neuter, woman masculine, moon masculine and sun feminine.” In languages that still have gender, masculine and feminine nouns do not always refer to actual males and females.

The Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage (Harper & Row) says, “The use of gender to mean sex in senses other than grammatical . . . is frowned upon by careful users of the language.” Careful users of the language take note.