quote: You may not know that many non-living things have a gender. For example:
1) Ziploc Bags -- They are Male, because they hold everything in, but you can see right through them.
2) Copiers -- They are Female, because once turned off, it takes a while to warm them up again. It's an effective reproductive device if the right buttons are pushed, but can wreak havoc if the wrong buttons are pushed.
3) Tire -- Male, because it goes bald and it's often over-inflated.
4) Hot Air Balloon -- Male, because, to get it to go anywhere, you have to light a fire under it and, of course, there's the hot air component.
5) Sponges -- Female, because they're soft, squeezable and retain water.
6) Web Page -- Female, because it's always getting hit on.
7) Subway -- Male, because it uses the same old lines to pick people up.
8) Hourglass -- Female, because over time, the weight can shift to the bottom.
9) Hammer -- Male, because it hasn't changed much over the last 5,000 years, but it's handy to have around.
10) Remote Control -- Female. Ha! You thought it'd be Male. But consider this -- it gives a man pleasure, he'd be lost without it, and while he doesn't always know the right buttons to push, he keeps trying.
quote:Remote Control -- Female. Ha! You thought it'd be Male. But consider this -- it gives a man pleasure, he'd be lost without it, and while he doesn't always know the right buttons to push, he keeps trying.
What I thought of when I saw this thread title was my Volvo. I always think of cars as female, yet the Volvo is a male car. There is a man symbol on the logo, ever notice that? A friend said a car in Germany is also male. How about France and Italy? Other countries?
Posts: 10890 | Registered: May 2003
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The word 'car' is masculine in Norwegian. You know, grammaticists (is that a word?) could have saved considerable trouble by classifying words as Type A, Type B, and Type C, isntead. For example, 'a girl' is masculine. 'A child' is neutral, which makes sense, but 'a rock' is masculine, which doesn't. Then there's the interesting fact that my particular dialect of Norwegian does not use the feminine gender at all.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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Car is feminine in French (la voiture) and Russian (машина). Hmm, actually looks like it can be masculine in Russian too: автомобиль. (Actually, "car" in French means "because", but that's a different story.)
KoM, that's cool that your dialect doesn't use the feminine gender. I guess in some languages the connection between grammatical gender and "real" gender is stronger than in others.
*is a closet linguist*
Posts: 1810 | Registered: Jan 1999
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We don't have the neutral gender for inanimate objects, in Portuguese, so everything is either male or female.
Posts: 1785 | Registered: Oct 2003
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quote:10) Remote Control -- Female. Ha! You thought it'd be Male. But consider this -- it gives a man pleasure, he'd be lost without it, and while he doesn't always know the right buttons to push, he keeps trying.
posted
I noticed that most of the male objects are male because they have the same properties of males, but most of the female ones are females because they have to deal with the same stuff as females...
Posts: 2489 | Registered: Jan 2002
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