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Greetings and salutations in a new age

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2008

Alleen Pace Nilsen
Affiliation:
Graduate College, Arizona State University

Abstract

An analysis of the salutations of seventy-five letters of application for an academic position at a large southwestern university showed that a majority of the writers (forty-seven as compared to twenty-eight) had become sensitive to the problems of beginning a letter to an unknown person or group with a masculine greeting. The twenty-eight applicants who used masculine greetings used only four different forms. But the forty-seven applicants who chose to use sex-neutral greetings had no well-established pattern to follow. Hence, they used nineteen different forms, which shows that the matter is currently in a state of experimentation. From an analysis of the candidates' supporting data, it was clear that the writers who used the sex-neutral greetings were the better qualified candidates. Females were more inclined than males to use sex-neutral greetings. And there was a correlation between the part of the country where a candidate lived and whether or not a sex-neutral greeting was chosen. (Sexism, diachronic linguistics, regional dialectology)

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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