People of the Internet: we can fix the English language
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People of the Internet: we can fix the English language
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Re: People of the Internet: we can fix the English language
#2>If you spend a lot of time writing copy for the web or answering support emails, you know what I’m talking about. When you start a sentence, you can feel the nausea coming on from a mile away: there’s no gender neutral third person singular pronoun.
Technically, there is such a thing. "it" is a gender neutral third person singular pronoun[1] and even more amusingly it is not part of the proposed "replacement" list. It does sound very weird in most cases - and would definitely look dehumanizing in a support reply, but technically speaking the language is not broken.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_%28pronoun%29 . Example given: "Is it a boy or a girl?"
Re: People of the Internet: we can fix the English language
#3>If you spend a lot of time writing copy for the web or answering support emails, you know what I’m talking about. When you start a sentence, you can feel the nausea coming on from a mile away: there’s no gender neutral third person singular pronoun. Technically, there is such a thing. "it" is a gender neutral third person singular pronoun[1] and even more amusingly it is not part of the proposed "replacement" list.…
I like the Mandarin Chinese approach:
he, she and it: ta
his, hers, and its: ta de
they and their: ta men and ta men de
Clean, simple and consistent (although the ambiguity is another problem).
Re: People of the Internet: we can fix the English language
#4I just use "they". That has a better chance of adoption than any of the proposals listed.
Re: People of the Internet: we can fix the English language
#5I just use "they". That has a better chance of adoption than any of the proposals listed.
I agree. The proposed options seem too weird to be accepted easily. If you just started using one in your writing, people would think it was a typo.
I don't think there's a downside to just using "they".
Re: People of the Internet: we can fix the English language
#6I just use "they". That has a better chance of adoption than any of the proposals listed.
I also don't understand the reluctance to use it. It's as versatile as "some" in logic/mathematics. And its already common usage: "If a person walks into a bar, and they order a drink..." - sounds fine to me. Maybe there are cases where it sounds strange?
Re: People of the Internet: we can fix the English language
#7[deleted]
Re: People of the Internet: we can fix the English language
#8The author claims using "they" is common, but grammatically incorrect - then recommends some arbitrary (and currently unknown and incorrect) set of replacement words to be adopted and thus become correct by weight of numbers.
Why not just continue using "they" until it is widely accepted enough to be correct? Frankly, I don't think we're too far off that. The supposedly erroneous example he quoted read fine to me.
Re: People of the Internet: we can fix the English language
#9I just use "they". That has a better chance of adoption than any of the proposals listed.
I also don't understand the reluctance to use it. It's as versatile as "some" in logic/mathematics. And its already common usage: "If a person walks into a bar, and they order a drink..." - sounds fine to me. Maybe there are cases where it sounds strange?
I was talking to a group of friends about this and he thought it was weird too.
Re: People of the Internet: we can fix the English language
#10The author claims using "they" is common, but grammatically incorrect - then recommends some arbitrary (and currently unknown and incorrect) set of replacement words to be adopted and thus become correct by weight of numbers. Why not just continue using "they" until it is widely accepted enough to be correct? Frankly, I don't think we're too far off that. The supposedly erroneous example he quoted read fine to me.
Yes. Treating 'they' as singular also has precedent in English with the replacement of 'thou' with 'you' as second person singular. Perhaps future Southerners will use 'they-all' as third person plural.