Shipping dept.; pronoun overboard.(reference to ships in the United Kingdom)(The Talk of the Town)

The gloved hand pauses before dispatching the champagne bottle toward the gleaming hull, and a royal voice pronounces the baptismal words: "May God bless her and all who sail in her." Ships have been female in English since at least 1375, according to the Oxford English Dictionary; but one traditional endorser of their sex has decided to neuter the fleet. Lloyd's List, since 1734 the daily gazette of world shipping news, is going over from "she" to "it." It tried the change four years ago but surrendered in the face of verbal boarding parties from nautical traditionalists. The editor, Julian Bray, says, hard-heartedly, of ships, "Ultimately, they are commodities, they are commercial assets. They are not things that have character -- either male or female."

Macho mariners responded with the insistence that ships always had been and ever would be female (bloody-minded, expensive, continually needing a lick of paint), while feminist academics applauded this modernization of the language as overdue. Ships were one of a long line of things -- fowling pieces, cannon, cars, trains -- that boys patronizingly compared to girls. Undeterred, the Royal Navy announced that it would continue to refer to its vessels in the feminine.

Yet man talk about ships is not the same as boy talk about cars; and the editor of Lloyd's List is wrong to imagine that ships were female in the first place because of their attributed "character." It is a question not of character but of spirit; a vessel suggests an entity greater than the sum of its parts. Marina Warner, the scholar of female representation, told me, "It's one of those metaphors we live by. It's linked to the idea of the ship as an image for the ...