Are our street names sexist?

[Laura]

That someone is making an issue out of this is absurd.

But, on a semi-related note... am I the only one who has assigned a perceived gender to street name suffixes? Suffixes that one might associate with big, major thoroughfares ("avenue", "boulevard", "street", "road") are masculine while suffixes typically only found on small side streets ("place", "lane", "terrace", "court") are feminine.

Oddly enough, YES.

As for the topic at hand, a lot of the streets in Baltimore City are the surnames of notable men. It almost doesn't matter, though, because only historians could tell you that Preston was a mayor of Baltimore and that Howard was a governor of MD, for instance. And in reality, the general public could care less as long as the road doesn't have lane closures or too many potholes.

[english si]

The whole street suffix gender thing sounds similar to most Indo-European languages having genders for everything.

I remember French lessons where I got told "no no no, not le table, but la table - can't you see that it's feminine" was said by the (native speaking) teacher and the response was typically something (unless the person wasn't feeling in the mood for trouble) along the lines of "are the French insane - table's an it" and I'm pretty sure one time some story about the classroom coming alive at night and the reason why the female tables were held together by chewing gum was that the masculine items were giving them a damn good seeing to every night. Purely out of frustration, not malice - though the teacher didn't typically see it that way and decided that we ought to be punished if we went on a rant at how illogical french nouns are.

[oscar]

The whole street suffix gender thing sounds similar to most Indo-European languages having genders for everything.

I remember French lessons where I got told "no no no, not le table, but la table - can't you see that it's feminine" was said by the (native speaking) teacher and the response was typically something (unless the person wasn't feeling in the mood for trouble) along the lines of "are the French insane - table's an it" and I'm pretty sure one time some story about the classroom coming alive at night and the reason why the female tables were held together by chewing gum was that the masculine items were giving them a damn good seeing to every night. Purely out of frustration, not malice - though the teacher didn't typically see it that way and decided that we ought to be punished if we went on a rant at how illogical french nouns are.

Similar for Spanish, where the gender assignments for nouns can also tie into other biases -- for example, "right" is "el derecho" while "left" is "la izquierda".

[Duke87]

The gender of ordinary nouns thing never bothered me at all, and honestly it seems perfectly natural. But then again, I was exposed to a lot of Italian at a young age, so maybe that's where I picked up the tendency.