Re: Personification

Subject: Re: Personification
From: Dick Margulis <margulis -at- fiam -dot- net>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Sat, 03 Apr 2004 05:44:04 -0500


Bonnie Granat wrote:

An author has gone to the trouble of naming his robots in a computer
science textbook, but proceeds to talk about them individually as
"it."

Is this the way it's done?

Yup. That's the way she's done ;-)


Why bother personifying them with human names if one's going to refer
to an individual robot as an "it"?


I'd stop at Why bother personifying them. Period. If the robots are humanoid house servants trimmed out to resemble a maid and a butler, and the marketing department wants to refer to them as she and he respectively, well, that may be tasteless, politically incorrect, and whatever other epithets you want to throw at the situation; but I suppose they'd be within their rights, however antediluvian an attitude such a product line would represent. But in a computer science textbook--even if it's for fourth-graders--anthropomorphizing computers is a Bad Idea for SO many reasons.

Is there any way you can ask the author to rethink this approach altogether? Or is the project too far along for that?

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References:
Personification: From: Bonnie Granat

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