Article: 178538 of talk.bizarre
From: plord@uspto.gov (a hurricane triggered by butterfly's wings)
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre
Subject: Pre-emtive duck mode
Date: 1 Dec 1994 10:53:49 -0500
Organization: the breaking of small, important bones
Lines: 30
Message-ID: <3bkrid$fm6@pioneer.uspto.gov>
Summary: don't kill me yet, this is the only one of these I have planned
Status: O

Ok, bear with me on this one.

Suppose in the future that the Political Correctness thing gets so out of
hand that all reference to gender, including pronouns, are removed from the
titles of children's books, so that each and every book will be accessibly
to each and every child.  For example, a ten pager from Gold Seal that used
to be called _Johnny Wants to be a Fireman!_ would have to be retitled to
something like _You Could Fight Fires_.

>From there the syndrome infects all other gendered speech.  As an almost
unnoticed by-product of this effect, job descriptions will only be expressed
in gerunds, i.e., "Fights Fires" or "Sweeps Floors" or what have you. 
Unnoticed, that is, until these same job description gerunds work back down
the chain and become the titles of those same children's books.

Right.  Now imagine that miraculous advances occur in the fields of
microtechnology and robotics, once again making science fiction into science
fact.

You can see it coming, can't you?

The job description gerund, and likewise the title of the children's book,
will be:

"Wears Waldoes"

paul 
-- 
"I'm really so very, very sorry for making you hike all the way up this
mountain, really, but you just HAD to see this pebble, it's so NEAT."