Language use in France and Oxford

"The Times" today features articles on Macron's wife, as I discovered after posting the previous blog entry. The articles are advertised on the front page of the paper with the headline: 'The First Cougar?", which really catches the eye as a being nice and classy, doesn't it? Anyway the main article, written by Helena Frith Powell, starts out very positively by describing "the spring in every older Frenchwoman's step" caused by glamorous Brigitte Trogneux, the 64 year-old spouse of the presidential candidate. But the second paragraph begins: "France is an extremely sexist society. You have only to look at how the language is structured to see that. A group of men and women in a room become grammatically masculine." So would a group of foodstuffs, or plants, or whatever. It's gender (linguistic), not sex (physical, biological), that dictates the rule. What else is a language with gendered nouns and pronouns supposed to do with a group composed of both genders? I always thought it was a neat solution for the masculine plural to be made to encompass the feminine, whereas when you have a feminine plural you can be certain only feminine genders are being referred to. Simple! Further down in the article Frith Powell has no problem quoting Inès de la Fressange's reference to the country as a whole in the feminine: "France is showing her individualism". Is this traditional usage also wrong? Should men decry it as sexist? Traditional language use comes under fire elsewhere in the "times2" section. The columnist Robert Crampton comments on the silliness of Oxford University's recent warning to its (or 'her') students about how failure to make proper eye contact could be construed as a micro-aggression. Crampton rightly points out that youths arriving at University are not necessarily blessed with perfect social manners and beyond that, could find sustained eye contact difficult for a variety of reasons (he mentions shyness, introversion, mental health issues; to which one could add, learning difficulties, being anywhere on the autistic spectrum, plain kookiness and good old-fashioned eccentricity). But that's not enough for Crampton: he has to manufacture a grievance with Oxford for its use of traditional names to refer to the three terms of its academic year: Michaelmas, Hilary and Trinity (Trinity being the current term). "As if anyone knows what Trinity means!" rebukes Crampton. His advice to Oxford, so as to make everyone "feel more welcome", is to "ditch the whole embarrassing antiquated private-lingo nonsense." Right. So, does he know for a fact that those students from "unlikely backgrounds" feel micro-aggressed by the term names? If so, maybe the names of the Colleges are also a problem? How about the name 'Oxford' itself: too grand-sounding, too steeped in history for comfort? Where does such nonsense begin, and where would it end? As someone who came here in 1988 from a most unlikely background, I can vouch that learning the unwritten rules and the formal peculiarities of such an ancient university was far more of a strain than learning three new names. In fact those names can be seen as a plus, as different and interesting. Oxford Brookes University, up the hill in Headington, now operates a two-semester year, unimaginatively referred to as Semester 1 and Semester 2. Is that better and, if so, why? Discuss. I'm not sure in what way Crampton finds the traditional term names 'embarrassing'. 'Antiquated' means 'old, used here in a pejorative sense. Well, those names are old, but they are not 'private-lingo'. On the contrary, they are drawn from the social and church year, as they were observed by pretty much everyone in the country for hundreds of years. And far from being 'nonsense', they refer to dates and events everyone used to observe or at the very least know about. Michealmas:  the feast day of St Michael, September 29th, also marking one of the four 'quarter days' of the year when rents etc were due; Hilary: named after the feast day of St Hilary, January 14th; Trinity, the summer term: named after Trinity Sunday, the first Sunday after Pentecost, Jesus's promised gift of the Spirit after his Ascension, and thus celebrating the fullness of the Triune God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Mr Crampton might not believe in what the term names refer to, but what he should find embarrassing is the ignorance and chronological snobbery of his attack on them.