Spelling is (also) politics
The choice of words, and even their simple spelling, sometimes takes on an unsuspected importance. Muriel Gilbert, corrector at Mondereturns to dilemmas that agitated the French company – and the editorial staff of the newspaper.
The perpetual secretary of the French Academy Hélène Carrère d’Encausse died in August 2023. The first woman to occupy this prestigious position, the historian nevertheless died in the male, and had insisted on this point as soon as he was appointed, in 1999. “She stressed that this election was” important for women “, then wrote The world, But decided that she would be called “Madam the perpetual secretary.”
“The secretary”, in the feminine, did she send back in her mind, as in that of her contemporaries, to a subordinate function … and typically female? In most companies of the 21st century, moreover, the secretaries have disappeared in favor of assistants, who fully fulfill the same functions, under a different name, rid of its pejorative perfume.
