‘We’re not throwing man overboard overboard,’ says the Royal Yachting Association. ‘It’s a universally recognised term that we want people to use in an emergency.’ It has little choice, since man overboard is incorporated in international treaties. So the association recommends its use only when following safety procedures, ‘until this is able to change’.
Until that happy day, the RYA has issued a slim volume, Inclusive Language Guidance, with a sort of phrasebook thrown in. A sample is: ‘Ze went sailing yesterday. Zir boat is green. That boat belongs to zem.’ This indicates not that the speaker is German, or perhaps from Somerset, but that the person being spoken about has chosen those strange pronouns as zir own. You can’t avoid it: ‘Everybody has pronouns… even if we don’t identify outside of our assigned sex at birth.’ I don’t think that I was ‘assigned’, but my husband, a retired doctor, would not take long to ascertain that the sex noted on my birth certificate is the one I still enjoy. My daughter would concur.
The commitment to inclusion can produce funny-sounding sentences: ‘They are a person who is dual-heritage.’ That is like Margaret Thatcher’s ‘We are a grandmother’.
One question in the phrasebook is: ‘How can we make sure people who are genderqueer feel comfortable to use our spaces?’ It would be unthinkable to ask: ‘How can we make sure people who are genderqueer do not make women feel uncomfortable by using their spaces?’
‘Avoid terms such as able-bodied,’ the RYA insists. It must be goodbye to able seamen. ABs must not boast of seamanship. ‘You might hear a person who works the winch on a boat be referred to as a winchman… The best term for this role is winchperson.’ Inhabitants of the phrasebook’s world sound deranged, or like ‘people experiencing mental health issues’. Learning from the booklet, instead of referring to a drunken sailor, I think we should say: ‘A person experiencing alcohol abuse who enjoys sailing.’
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