why is it...a her

in teaching english i get all kinds of questions about the culture that i am from. they can be as simple as...
what kind of food we eat to explain the difference between family relations here and family relations there. (they don't understand why i would leave my family behind to come here...something they might have in common with my mother.)

anyways..a couple of days ago i was in a discussion with some friends and when the wind began to blow very heavily to where leaves were falling all around us. and to this i made to comment.."i wish she would stop throwing leaves at us." this set off a conversation that i was just not ready for. upon me saying this one of my friends ask me if i just called that tree a she. to which i responded, yea, of course. he immediately said "no thats an it." i began to say, well yea but...and i began to see that this was going to take some explanation. so i took a deep breath and began to tell them that in my culture, as a guy i call many things that might be considered an "it" a "she".

the example that came to my mind was my car.(who i miss alot..she was good to me.) i told them that when i talk about my car i refer to her (it) as a she. such as...
she is so good to me.
she can be a pain in the butt
she just got washed and is now looking good.

things like that

well by this point it was time for me to go and teach so i said, "excuse me i must go and teach but if you see jamie ask him about turbo (the name of jamie's car). then i left.

i came out from teaching and saw jamie talking with a couple of the guys that i had had this conversation with and asked them if they had asked him about turbo and having not done this they thought this would be a great time to do so.
so they do just this and everyone gets a good laugh but they decided that the answer that i gave to why we call its a she no longer satisfied them and asked jamie why we did this. already having had this conversation with them i sat back and just went along for the ride.

he begins by telling them pretty much the same thing that i said to them but unlike when they were talking to me, they did not like or maybe did not quit understand what jamie was saying, so they prompted him further. what they really wanted was why do we not use the masculine "he". so jamie tried to explain that in some cases we do use the masculine "he" but that usually it was more of a joke. (much like some friends i know who have named their cars "derek" and "philip".....excellent names by the way). by saying this they did not understand why we use "he" as a joke, so he had to explain further. at this point i am really starting to laugh because now this whole conversation is just going in a circle and it seems that there is no end in site. however i do have one thing that always end the conversation when they start to go like this. thats the bus system. when it gets late all the busses stop running, so luckily for me this is exactly what happened.

the conversation ended just as strangely as it started, with an abrupt, i gotta bounce...

so the moral of the story...

don't call an it, a she