Thomas Fuller and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs

Manhole will be replaced with maintenance hole. Sisters and brothers will be replaced with siblings. And he or she will be banished in favor of they, even if referring to one person.

The City Council’s unanimous decision was meant to send a message about equal chances and representation, said Lori Droste, a council member.

“Your gender has no relevance in whether you can perform work and receive services,” Droste said.

The law would apply to traffic, health and safety regulations, garbage collection, environmental rules, buildings and construction permits — all of the business of a city.

What happens in California has often made its way across the country, whether it was banning smoking in restaurants, enacting strict tailpipe emission standards or allowing right turns at red lights.

But are other American cities ready, as well, to fundamentally change the English language?

Keith Johnson, chair of the department of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley says the English language has been evolving away from gender-specific terms for many years.

“As the society changes, there, will be pressure for the language to change, as well,” Johnson said. “That will be a generational change.”

Already, a number of cities in recent years have adopted laws on gender-related speech.

Philadelphia residents approved a ballot measure by about two-thirds support in May that changed the city’s charter to describe representatives as “council members” rather than “councilmen.” The borough of Fairbanks North Star in Alaska unanimously passed a resolution in late February removing gendered words from its city code and replacing some with the singular “they,” “their” and “them.”

Last month, Multnomah County in Oregon, which has a population of about 800,000 and includes Portland, passed a similar measure, replacing gendered pronouns with the singular use of “they” and related words. Miami replaced gendered words in 2017 and changed all singular pronouns — many of which had previously just said “he” — to “he/she.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/us/berkeley-gender-ban.html" id="c22c9c1b-9200-3b8a-a468-a9411436f5ec">The New York Times</a>.

BERKELEY, Calif. — The city of Berkeley, long a bastion of liberal ideas, voted this week to purge gender from its law books.

No More Manholes in Berkeley as City Writes Gender Out of Codes

“Your gender has no relevance in whether you can perform work and receive services,” Droste said. “Women and nonbinary folks are just as entitled to accurate representation.”

Keith Johnson, chair of the department of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley — up the road from Berkeley City Hall — says the English language has been evolving away from gender-specific terms for many years. Stewardess is out of touch; the preferred term is of course flight attendant. Waitresses and waiters are now often known as servers.

“As the society changes, there will be pressure for the language to change, as well,” Johnson said. “That will be a generational change.”

In some languages, gender pronouns are less of an issue. In Thai, a single word can convey he, she and they. In Turkish “o” means he, she or it. In Mandarin Chinese, the characters for he and she are different, but they are pronounced the same.

But in English, as with French, Spanish, German and many other languages, gender is intertwined with pronouns.

Some grammarians have resisted the solution of “they” when referring to a single person.

Droste, the Berkeley council member, said she was surprised how much attention — and criticism — the ordinance had received. City Hall was deluged with calls and emails, she said.

“I am not the type of legislator who likes to vote for solutions in search of a problem,” she said. “But I think this poses a very real issue.”

Miami, unlike Berkeley, chose to continue referring to people in the third person as he or she because of concerns about how the more modern use of the singular “they” would be interpreted in court.

“Unfortunately, when it comes to interpretation of words, when you have things that are vague, it can create problems,” said Leah Weston, a lawyer who as a policy director in the Miami city government started the effort to rewrite the code. “Using a plural pronoun to refer to the singular could cause some confusion, and local governments — any kinds of governments — are dragged into court all the time.”

When Fairbanks North Star unanimously passed its resolution in February, choosing to use “they” and “their” as singular, one critical blogger called it a “grammatical mutilation.”

Suzanne Downing, the blogger, said the borough should have stuck with he/she.

“There will be a lot of explaining to do,” she said. “The conservative perspective is that this makes the language confusing. It’s a torture of the language.”

Sophie Hahn, a Berkeley council member who was trained as a lawyer, said she understood how using “they” in the singular can be jarring.

“It kind of bugs me — when I hear it, I don’t like it,” she said. “But that’s OK. I’m willing to change. We all have to change.”

Hahn described the ordinance as “very important for all people who don’t identify as men.”

She gave the example of a girl growing up and hearing the word chairman, unsure whether that job was for her.

The ordinance, she said, would help change that assumption.

Matthai Chakko, a representative for the city, said Berkeley’s approximately 1,500 employees are not obliged to follow the new rules in conversation. And he does not rule out putting more gender-related words on the proscribed list. The ordinance mentions sisters and brothers, but not mothers or fathers, for example.

“This is something that isn’t just happening overnight,” he said. “I’m sure there are going be things that we discover that can be updated to be neutral.”

But such is the potential devastation of earthquakes in California that seismologists described it as only a moderate one that would not have any bearing on the inevitable arrival of a giant earthquake, which could unleash at least 30 times more seismic energy.

Californians woke early Friday to a 5.4 magnitude aftershock, a day after the 6.4 magnitude earthquake in the Mojave Desert shook the small desert city of Ridgecrest, causing minor injuries but heralding the end of a period of seismic quiet in California. Thursday’s earthquake was the strongest in California in two decades.

Paul Caruso, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colorado, said Thursday’s earthquake did not change the agency’s calculations of when the big one might strike.

“We are not changing our forecast for the San Andreas,” Caruso said. “We still believe there’s a 70% chance of a magnitude 7 or greater in Southern California before 2030.”

The faults around Ridgecrest are part of the larger San Andreas system that runs from the Gulf of California to Mendocino, north of San Francisco.

The San Andreas fault, which runs near heavily populated areas and defines the boundary between the North American and Pacific tectonic plates, is considered the biggest seismic threat to California. Related cracks in the earth, like the Hayward fault that runs through Oakland and Berkeley in the San Francisco Bay Area, are also considered major threats.

Tom Heaton, an earthquake expert at the California Institute of Technology, said the region where Thursday’s earthquake struck seems to be characterized by a complex set of faults that have helped form geological features called basin and ranges.

“These basin and range earthquakes often come in clusters of events,” Heaton said.

Susan Hough, a seismologist with the USGS, said Friday’s 4:07 a.m. tremor, 9 miles northeast of Ridgecrest near where Thursday’s earthquake took place, would likely be the strongest aftershock, although more powerful ones could follow. There have been about 200 aftershocks since Thursday’s earthquake.

Seismologists have puzzled over why California’s biggest faults have been relatively quiet in recent decades. At the same time, experts have warned that California remains unprepared for a big quake in many keys areas. Few people have bought earthquake insurance, and the state has many buildings that are likely to suffer major damage because of the way they are constructed.

Even though it occurred on minor faults, Thursday’s earthquake could be felt as far away as San Francisco and Phoenix. Around 50,000 people reported on the USGS website that they felt the shaking.

On Friday morning, Giselle Miranda was putting on her shoes in her Palmdale, California, living room when she said she heard a rumbling noise from below and a cracking sound from the walls. Her apartment quivered, and she checked on her sisters. The quake “definitely had me a little shaken up,” Miranda said, even if it lasted for only a few seconds.

Hough said she did not expect the aftershocks to be felt too far from the epicenter of Thursday’s earthquake, although she cautioned that anything could happen. Seismologists are able to understand earthquake patterns in retrospect, but it is much more difficult to predict patterns until events are over, she said.

Hough said a wry line attributed to Charles Richter, the man who developed a scale to measure earthquake strength, held up: “When you get a lot of earthquakes, you get a lot of earthquakes.”

“This is the time in California where you want to stay on your toes,” she said.

Rattling reminder that the big one is coming

SAN FRANCISCO — For those near the epicenter of the earthquake that struck Southern California on Thursday, the ground jolted so violently that it bounced them off their feet.

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Thomas Fuller and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs

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No More Manholes in Berkeley as City Writes Gender Out of Codes

No More Manholes in Berkeley as City Writes Gender Out of Codes

Rattling reminder that the big one is coming