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TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR
This section features wide-ranging, thought-provoking articles in English on any subject under the sun. Its objective is to present new, mind-changing ideas as well as to show to serious students of English how the various tools of the language can be felicitously harnessed to report a momentous or life-changing finding or event, to espouse or oppose an idea, or to express a deeply felt view about the world around us.
The outstanding English-language expositions to be featured here will mostly be presented through links to the websites that carry them. To put a particular work in better context, links to critiques, biographical sketches, and various other material about the author and his or her works will usually be also provided.
I hope you’ll enjoy the new selections that will be presented here each week.Joe Carillo
The linguistic distinction between “actress,” “actor” beyond sexism
In an article he wrote for The Los Angeles Times on the eve of the 82nd Oscar Academy Awards last March 7, Dennis Dutton, philosophy professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and author of The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, took occasion to answer a perennial question: Why differentiate between actor and actress in awarding Oscars when the Academy doesn’t take sex into account in designating best art direction or best editing?
Dutton says there’s more to the linguistic distinction between “actress” and “actor” than mere sexism or stereotyping. “There are roles that are not interchangeable, either historically or biologically,” he argues. “This means that the sex of actresses and actors is intrinsic to their work in ways that the sex of a doctor is not…Central casting does not send a petite young woman to play a sumo wrestler, or a muscular hunk to play someone's sweet aged mother. This isn’t sexism; it is the human condition.”
He adds: “On stage and on the screen, rest assured that none of it will ever be effectively played by unisex acting persons. We need men and we need women. We need actors and we need actresses.”
Read Dennis Dutton’s “Oscar isn’t sexist” in The Los Angeles Times now!
