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Department of Linguistics

AUSTRALIAN STYLE

A NATIONAL BULLETIN ON ISSUES IN
AUSTRALIAN STYLE AND ENGLISH IN AUSTRALIA

Volume 16 No 2  December 2009

letters

Dear Pam

I have a curly question for you.

For as long as I can remember, ships have been referred to as female;
e.g. HMAS Melbourne  was an aircraft carrier in the Royal Australian
Navy, and her displacement was about 20,000 tonnes.

My question is this: is it politically correct to refer to ships as
"she/her", or would the purists object, and refer to "it". I will
probably continue to use the female, but I am interested in what you
think about political correctness in this instance.

Phil Helmore

via email

Responses

1.

Dear Adam

Your letter writer, Phil Helmore, whose email address was not provided, might find the following background interesting. These are two articles about the famous Lloyds of London ceasing to refer to ships as 'she', that I remember as being a hot issue. I'm sure there is a lot more out there about the issue, but this is all I had time to find.

http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Lloyd's_List
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/138678.stm

Lindy Shultz

The Australian National University

2.

What nostalgia to see that old chestnut about whether or not it's PC to call ships she (Phil Helmore April 2009)! Long and strong did that one rage here at the Australian National Maritime Museum in our earlier days.

Some believed the feminisation of vessels to be a poetic tribute to the beauty of ships and the bond sailors feel to them. Others believed it signified that women AND ships were possessions to be owned and controlled by men. The issues were explored in depth in my paper 'Heirlooms and Teatowels: Views of Ships Gender in the Modern Maritime Museum' (Mellefont J R 2000, The Great Circle, Journal of the Australian Association for Maritime History Vol 22 No 1 pp. 5--16.

it was never really resolved; the antagonists just wore each other out and in the end carried on with their preferred usage in their own spheres of influence. Ships are never referred to by the feminine personal pronouns in this museum's exhibitions; in its publications they are 'she', 'her', 'it/s' as appropriate.



Jeffrey Mellefont
Publications manager
Australian National Maritime Museum.

 

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