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The original post is using "gendered" in a non-linguistic sense (with a meaning something like '[disproportionately] associated with a particular gender'). There are definitely adjectives and nouns that have such a strong gender connotation that they're used almost exclusively to refer to people of one gender, even though gender isn't necessarily part of their definition. (Common examples in English are "feisty", "perky", "bitchy", and "voluptuous", although there are others.) It seems quite possible to imagine verbs entering this category, so that they'd be used in practice almost exclusively with subjects of one gender, though I don't know of an example in English. I think the original post's use of "gendered" is actually weaker than this phenomenon because it says that "love (one's activity or profession)" is used much more by men than by women, not necessarily that it's acquired a connotation for listeners that the subject is male. (So the Hacker School administrators' concern is that women tend not to describe themselves as "loving programming", not that a listener hearing that "X loves programming" will assume that X is a man.) I guess I just mean to suggest that it's quite possible to imagine a verb also acquiring such a connotation for listeners, even if this one hasn't in this case. Getting back to the linguistic question of whether verbs can have gender, I think that duco in the sense of 'take (a wife)' in Latin can only be applied to a man's act of marrying a woman, and not to a woman's act of marrying a man, but that might be more a matter of ancient Roman legal understanding of marriage and so could be closer to your example of "impregnate" than to the original post's sense, which is meant to refer more to connotations than to grammatical possibility or impossibility. There actually are languages that have genders for verbs, where gender is a feature for which verbs are inflected and where verbs must agree with their subject in gender as well as, say, number. For instance, in Hebrew if a male subject loves something, the verb form is אוֹהֵב ohev, whereas when a female subject loves something, the verb form is אוֹהֵבֵת ohevet. Arabic also has gender-marked verb forms that agree with the grammatical gender of the subject. This has no connection to the way the original post uses the term, though! |