Trawling through a back issue of the delightful webzine Take Our Word For It, I came across this complaint contributed by a reader, together with Mike/Melanie’s joking response.

Q: While I'm at it, would you please explain to your readers that gender is a matter of grammar. Sex is a different matter and is what you check in little boxes on government forms.

A: Yes gender is a matter of grammar but sex... Isn't that how they have coal delivered in Cheltenham?
(if non-UK, see thread on RP for this pronunciation)

Sex is a wonderfully ambiguous word, with so many loaded connotations. It is perhaps worth noting in passing even a verbal use of the word, as in “sexing chicken”, with its elliptic sense of “separating chicken according to their sexual characteristics”.

Gender seems to me a plainer term, unencumbered and simple.

I was therefore puzzled by this curmudgeonly wisdom – it seems to me a useful term in common currency, important in that it strips out ambiguity for occasions when clarity is more vital than wit!

Does anyone else have strong feelings about applied sex?


http://www.takeourword.com/Issue102.html#Curmudgeon's Corner