"THAR SHE BLOWS!"

 

I was listening to a news report on National Radio this morning. It was about a 600 year old pohutukawa tree that had fallen over.

POHUTUKAWA

It's an interesting story but what marred it for me was the continual reference to the tree's gender as a woman. Here's an extract from the report:

"A small coastal town in the Bay of Islands is mourning the loss of a much-loved member of the community.

She was known and admired by Ōpua residents and visitors alike. Children were especially fond of her, and wildlife flocked to her in summer. No one had a bad word to say about her, though admittedly she never said a word to anyone.

She was - as far as anyone knows - about 600 years old."

For fucks sake! It's a tree.  It's not a woman.

"And I'm not a tree."

This annoys me a bit but it annoys The Old Girl more. She corrects people - ones we know and even strangers - who use the pronoun 'she' or 'her' when talking of ships, cars, storms, houses etc. and detests it when anyone refers to 'Mother Nature'. I can hear her going "Grrr" now as I think of it.

I agree with her since gender identification of inanimate objects is usually feminine with not that many things being called 'he' or 'his'. The issue came to a head years ago when the naming of hurricanes and cyclones was changed from only using female names to now alternating with male names. More recently the Scottish Maritime Museum  decided to adopt gender-neutral signage for its vessels, dropping "she" for "it" after two signs were vandalised. 

The practice of using the feminine pronoun for inanimate objects is no longer acceptable. Get over it.