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Should the line "True patriot love in all thy sons command" be changed to the gender neutral "in all of us command"?
Words matter. People tend to sweat over every syllable of contracts, treaties, speeches or legal decisions.
When it comes to national anthems, not so much.
Except, apparently, in bilingual Canada, where a long-running and sometimes emotional dispute over the lyrics in the English version of the national anthem "O Canada" flared up again this week.
The crux of a five-year semantic standoff is whether two words--"thy sons"-- in the 63-word anthem, dutifully sung by generations of Canadians, violate modern standards of verbal gender neutrality.
Mauril Belanger, a Liberal Member of Parliament from Ottawa, took up the charge on Monday to change the filial reference in the line "True patriot love in all thy sons command" to the gender neutral "in all of us command."
Not to do so he said, in what the CBC News reported to be "an impassioned address to a sparsely populated House of Commons," would be to exclude the more than 18 million women in Canada from representation in the anthem.
Not so, argued MPs from the ruling Conservative Party, whose lack of support likely will doom Belanger's bid. They pointed out that when such a change was proposed by Conservatives in 2010 it caused a huge negative uproar among Canadians.
"It was a clear indication that Canadians love their anthem and want to see it kept as is," Costas Menegakis, parliamentary secretary to the immigration minister, reportedly told his fellow Conservative MPs.
The current anthem is based on a 1908 poem and officially replaced "God Save the Queen" as the country's national anthem in 1980.
Oddly, Belanger's proposed word switch would bring the current anthem closer to its original - and presciently gender-neutral - version which used the phrase: "Thou dost in us command."
That wording was changed in 1913 to include the reference to sons, a revision some believe reflected unrest in the run-up to the First World War.
In 2013, a group of prominent Canadian women, including author Margaret Atwood and former Canadian Prime Minister Kim Campbell, lobbied to rid the anthem of the reference to "sons."
They created the website, www.restoreouranthem.ca, which provides an historical timeline of the anthem and argues for the change.
The website also has a list of frequently asked questions, the first of which is: "Doesn't our government have better things to do?"
The answer: "Our government has many important issues to deal with...The amendment of the National Anthem Act is one of many social changes that might be raised."
Yet, most Canadians still reject any change in their anthem, according to a 2013 Forum Research poll. It found that two-thirds wanted to keep their anthem as it is, 25 percent approved of ditching the reference to sons and 10 percent had no opinion.
That hardly means the country has a tin ear when it comes to gender-sensitive language.
In fact, the Canadian government supplies five pages of "Guidelines for gender-neutral language" on its official Language Portal of Canada web page.
There, one can learn practical techniques for avoiding all kinds of potentially offensive or sexist language, from substituting humankind for mankind to shunning gender-specific pronouns whenever possible.
While the battle for gender-neutrality in the English lyrics of the Canadian anthem may not be over, it never even started in the French version, which is devoid of "sons," "daughters" or virtually any other gender-specific words.
The only possible problem would be in the second line "Terre de nos aïeux," which could be translated as "land of our forefathers."
But, aïeux, although a masculine noun, could also be translated as "ancestors," which would be, of course, gender neutral.
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