Singular ‘They’ Is Word of the Year

Post by volaski » Wed, Dec 02, 2015, 9:17 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #150

volaski wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are certain cases where it feels very ridiculous. For example, some authors use "her" to refer to even a group of people generally known to be predominantly male oriented. While it definitely won't be criticized by any feminist group, it really is distracting from narrative point of view because most readers feel it's unnatural. I remember thinking "This guy is clearly talking about dudes, why is he using femal…

Now we know how women feel, all day long every day. It'd be reasonable to say "get over it", which is essentially what women hear all their lives.

Post by panglott » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 8:00 PM UTC

vorg wrote: post #119

volaski wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You see it in notifications from social apps. "Jenny has started following you. Follow them back", etc. Because a lot of apps don't ask people to enter their gender they just resort to "them" instead of "him" or "her". It's really as annoying as people just using "her" everywhere just to be safe.

It seems annoying because personal names like Jenny and John have grammatical gender in English, so the unknown grammar use of they/them/their seems unnatural. It's also perhaps why similar-sounding names are generally spelt differently between genders, e.g. Danny/Danni, Jerry/Jeri, Tony/Toni, Billy/Billie, Francis/Frances, Robin/Robyn, Sidney/Sydney.

Post by JoeAltmaier » Sat, Dec 05, 2015, 4:05 PM UTC

volaski wrote: post #154

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its equally ridiculous to use either gendered form for the wrong group. But groups of women are called 'guys' all the time. The observation that it sounds funny/annoying when a group of 'dudes' is labeled using a feminine term, is only something a male would notice. I'm suggesting 'get over it' because men have no special right to be not-annoyed by this.

Please don't try to use wordplay to get your feminist ideology across. Nobody calls a girl "Him" in real life, just like nobody calls a guy "Her" in real life. That's what I pointed out, not some interpretation of "guys" (I can go on forever talking about the semantics for that term too but that's not even what I was talking about)