The easy way is just to hit the right-most button above the "Body" field, which neatly splits the text you're replying to into paragraphs, at which point you just go paragraph by paragraph, deleting your own (unless you still need them) and adding comments after those of the other person. Or, like me, you can set your settings so that this is done automatically.

I'm not sure if this is actually the point you were getting at, but it would probably be true to say that my exposure to English is more biased towards the academic and literary than it would've been if I'd been a native speaker, yes. I already admitted that I have indeed overestimated how widely spread the connotation was (incidentally, did you spot the part where you misattributed my statement about that to Dom and based you on that mistake to dispute his disclaimers? You may want to correct that).

We will have to leave it to Celia to say either way, of course. Still, if she had actually never heard of the objection Vivien raised, I dare say she'd have reacted quite differently, and among other things, would not have replied to me saying "I understand that, but..." or "I don't think Jens was using it that way though". Considering Vivien's articles, it would seem rather logical that a highly educated young woman is indeed familiar with the issue, even if you are not.


It's rather hard to avoid the quantitative, don't you think? Having established that on the one hand the issue has been around for a long time, while on the other there are definitely many people who aren't even aware of it, there's not much left to argue about other than just how widespread its negative connotation is. There have only been two major "overreaching factual claims" in this discussion that I'm aware of. One was mine, when I indicated that this connotation was held by English speakers in general; I retracted that, and I haven't seen Vivien state anything of the sort. The other was Vivien's "it's an issue of correct grammar", which, agreed, was badly phrased and factually incorrect if you read it literally, but more on that below.

The third and probably most important thing is the "you shouldn't use it", as stated by Vivien and myself, which is indeed subjective, but after all the evidence I've seen in this discussion, I still stand by it.


This wasn't linked to the "that vs who" thing, and when I said "sex", I meant it in a broader sense than just the pornographic.

It entirely depends on which American you ask. You complain that people are making too broad claims about the connotation of the word, then you go and state simply that "an American" does not know this connotation? That's exactly the same as what you accuse us of doing (and as said above, Vivien never even did that, while I did but retracted it), but in reverse.

I don't know, I'm confused by your entire argument here about "generic nouns". How does that say anything about the difference between the nouns "female" and "woman"?


Good thinking.