Gender neutral ships now!

My male dog used to do the same, Bluebelle - usually cocked his leg but occasionally squatted on the lawn (leaving brown patches).

grumppa ?

We are all members of the Church of the Perpetually Offended now.

The feminine of the French chat is chstte, which is also a term of affection, as in ma chatte. Better to be a chatte than a bitch.

I could never work out how a female cat in French was a male etc etc
Yesterday I went for a walk with my granddaughter and her female dog we had to laugh as some wees she did squatting and for some she cocked her leg we said she was following the trend

I always went along with the convention of calling ships ‘she’ until my young son questioned it. He was about six, and said he thought it was stupid since ships were not female.
I decided I agreed with him and I now would refer to boats and ships as ‘it’.

Ha ha, gender neutral ships. That reminds me of when my daughter was six years old, and seeing a news item on television about a ship, which was referred to as ‘she.’ My daughter turned around and looked at me and said,
‘How do they know it’s a she? Do they turn it upside down and look underneath?’

Rufas Fred’s new home is Ty Bach, little house

Closer to home. In Welsh a ship is feminine and boat is masculine. ( a table is also feminine)

Oh gawd....I live on a narrow boat and I will continue to refer to my lovely home as SHE. Who on earth stays up late thinking of these stupid things?

‘Political correctness gone mad’ must be one of the most inane phrases in the English language. It’s utterly meaningless.

Political correctness has gone mad - to coin a phrase.

And ships are usually referred to as "it" in Danish, as are cars.

A sailor once told me that ships are shes, but ferries, and I think mine-sweepers, are referred to as he.

As for the grammatical gender thing, milk is masculine in French, but more logically feminine in Spanish.

Danish has a common and a neuter gender, but you need a dictionary to find out which gender nouns belong to.
"Child" is neuter, as is "animal", while loads of inanimate objects belong to the common gender.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_languages_with_grammatical_gender

Interesting article here - French Canada gets a brief mention

And how is uber woke Canada reconciling this in french speaking areas?

Serious question for the ex pat GNers amongst us, has this nonsense bypassed countries where the languages are more widely gendered like french etc?

Rufas sorry I didn’t see your suggestion of Freddiebach,
Not suitable for my Fred he isn’t little ?

Annie; I was guessing, without pictures of you and Fred! Not long ago a poster enquired as to whether you had come up with a name for Fred's new shed and of course, I've messed up as usual! My research shows "Mawr" for "big"; There's a coincidence! Not sure if they are related, but I'll post a selfie of me and Freda when I've sorted out a glitch with uploading. Good Health and Take Care. as you career around the district!

<eye roll> the status and value of motherhood depends on whether we call a ship she or not? I rather think it’s a little bit more complicated thsn that - if we valued caring and naturimg more we might pay those in the caring professions more for one thing.

What will a mother ship become? (eg as with spaceships in science fiction if not reality). It makes sense when you see the way a mother bird collects the babies under her wing in time of danger.
What this so called equality is doing is demoting the role of motherhood - caring, nurturing, the first educator etc instead of giving it the status and respect it deserves (whether carried out by a male or female), and society is all the worse for it.

I actually couldn’t care less about boats and gender but there is an underpinning and really important issue about gender and language ( and race and language etc). Because the boat issue is neither here nor there it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a serious point to be made about how we use language and how it shapes our perceptions of the world and our places within it.

Some people need to get a life, there more things to worry about than a boats gender. Who cares.

NannyG123; Mail boats, for starters!

The boats don't care, certainly. Trouble is, once the fanatic end of the gender-labelling lobby succeed in getting boats re-gendered, they will be cock-a-hoop enough to try to turn the "Huperson caught in persontrap in Personchester" jokes into seriously PC issues. On second thoughts, should that have been chicken-a-hoop?

Some people need to get a life, there more things to worry about than a boats gender. Who cares.

Rufas sorry I didn’t see your suggestion of Freddiebach,
Not suitable for my Fred he isn’t little ?

Freda ? Is she from the same family as my Fred ?