Why are objects always addressed with feminine nouns?
You probably grew up with the knowledge that nouns possess no gender and because the lady who once posed as an English tutor wanted to make life easy for everyone she supported the motion that nouns aren’t gendered specified.
Since this knowledge was infused into you in a school you must have dragged it to every argument holding a negative notion with all certainty that English nouns aren’t gendered affiliated probably screaming at the top of your voice whilst harbouring murderous intent towards the person opposing you.
Or perhaps none of the above can be applicable to your educational experience and as such you’re dumbfounded and unaware of this development.
Well, that’s you, I might have not been diagnosed with hyperthymesia, but I can remember vividly well that my English teacher back in the days mounted the grand stage and blatantly told every present pubescent that English nouns cover all except genders, of course, we believed her we were all implausibly naive.
Can we take this brief moment to ignore the fat potbellied man sitting on an armchair thinking he is invisible!.
Usually, when we come across genders in English every educator takes the liberty to direct our minds to think of male and female simply because no one is ready to explain why a ship can sometimes be called a “she”, that’s just one of the many clandestine NASA has been keeping from us all.
English nouns are gendered specific, and it’s not just the regular male, female, man or woman, boy or girl, it spans way beyond that to the extent that a country is addressed as if it’s sexually-oriented, buckle up you’re about to be “grammared”.
Some random English philosopher/adept thought of every possible way to make life easy for the once struggling to adopt and use a borrowed language, the innovative thought he birthed after gracing himself with the in-depth study of orthography led him to approve the application of gender for the sole purpose of categorization, this was more of a blueprint crafted with no technical tool, no pen no pencil, it was a semi-improvised technique,
a guide to enable the division of nouns into different groups. This person remains an unknown chauvinist primarily because no one has ever evolved to spawn out any outgrowing concern towards the reason for this, so no one bothered to dig deep for the name of the creator and why is that?
Because no one gives a damn if a spoon is a “he” or a “she”.
The only time genders are qualified to be important in English is when trying to give a definitive to the breathing organism next to you.
But since English has jointly become a criterion for communication even though it has a foreign origin it is expected of every person to learn every niche of it so instead of discussing why;
A is for apple,
The sky is blue, or,
where babies come from We’ll rather talk about the types of genders in English.
—Biological Gender: we don’t need to cut skin deep on this one, it refers to nouns from which a specific gender is derived because of their biological or most relevant trait. For example, the word man refers to males in totality, everything of masculine origin same goes for women and females.
—Grammatical gender: like earlier stated, it’s a system used to categorize nouns, this type of gender is what makes a noun agree with the modifying pronouns and adjectives.
— metaphorical genders: this is used when personifying abstract objects and concepts with genders.
Joe Devney explains the rubrics cube mechanism on Quora by simply saying;
“The feminine pronoun cannot be used for all inanimate objects, but it can sometimes be used for things that contain, or can contain people, typically, this category includes ships and countries, but probably things as well”.
That has always been and would always be the formulated conceit of Joe Devney the one among many who solves puzzles on Quora.
A lot of people agreed with Devney, but a few random feminists voiced out that the application of such was done to highlight the patriarchal idea that has governed the society a thought that likens women to objects, things that can be owned by their male counterparts. It has seldomly being implied.
The reason why objects are addressed with feminine nouns are;
—as Deveney said, the pronoun “she” is sometimes used to reference things that contain people, e.g. ships vehicles, planets, countries, and continents. The whole notion is been liken to a mother, the whole idea of conceiving kids has really influenced the development of this.
—it is a stylistic method, one employed mostly to enact the idea of a trope used to exercise endearment, this concept can further be broken down to the random cowboy or Farmer who knows his tractor intimately in a way no other man does. sometimes this can be used as a metaphor or imagery.
