11–20 of 32 posts
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As opposed to the gender-neutral 'they', which is the Best Thing (that few people seem to realise).
Many people still like to claim that 'they' can only be used as a plural.
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many people still like to claim that 'they' can only be used as a plural.
I personally think it just sounds awkward. Spivak pronouns can pick up all of the benefits of a singular "they" without the drawbacks, though.
"They" as a gender neutral singular pronoun is, to me, perfectly natural. I use it dozens of times a day as such without noticing.
Spivak pronouns, on the other hand, are blatantly marked, and were I to come across them in writing or speech, I'd find them very distracting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many people still like to claim that 'they' can only be used as a plural.
I personally think it just sounds awkward. Spivak pronouns can pick up all of the benefits of a singular "they" without the drawbacks, though.
I presume the author is female, according to her use of the feminine pronoun in referring to programmers generally. Nice to get a female perspective. I appreciate her emphasis on all the qualities beyond coding itself that contribute to a good programmer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I personally think it just sounds awkward. Spivak pronouns can pick up all of the benefits of a singular "they" without the drawbacks, though.
Spivak pronouns have all the benefits of a singular "they" with all the drawbacks of introducing a new set of pronouns into an established language . My experiences with programmers tell me that getting a large group of people to change syntax is not easy.
I agree that from a perspective of getting more people to use them the drawbacks are greater but from the perspective of understanding the drawbacks are essentially non-existent.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spivak pronouns have all the benefits of a singular "they" with all the drawbacks of introducing a new set of pronouns into an established language . My experiences with programmers tell me that getting a large group of people to change syntax is not easy.
Spivak pronouns do indeed come with drawbacks (as do all proposed solutions for gender-neutral language) but I put forth that said drawbacks are minimal. The pronoun set is intuitive to English-speakers and I've found that brief explanation, if any, has been required no more than once per person before they can easily grok my usages. I agree that from a perspective of getting more people to use them the drawbacks are…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As opposed to the gender-neutral 'they', which is the Best Thing (that few people seem to realise).
Many people still like to claim that 'they' can only be used as a plural.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As opposed to the gender-neutral 'they', which is the Best Thing (that few people seem to realise).
Many people still like to claim that 'they' can only be used as a plural.
That's why virtually all linguists take a descriptive approach to language and describe anything grammatical (as opposed to the phrase "grammatically correct" which would endorse the existence of a "right" and "wrong") if it sounds natural to native speakers. Unlike some linguists who love to see language change, I'm fine with people prescribing a standard and sticking to it for most written works, as long as they realize that it's just a standard and not some divine definition of "right" and "wrong." So feel free to use the singular "they" rather than artificial alternatives!
Note: Some far left scholars of gender studies demand the adoption of artificial gender-neutral pronouns (as opposed to using the singular "they") for a very different purpose--to make transgendered and intersexed people no longer "oppressed" by the English language. That is, if you already know the person you're talking about, all natural dialects of English involve saying "he" or "she" did blablabla. However, if someone identifies their gender (haha doesn't that sound so much more natural than "his or her gender"?) as something other than male or female, current English runs into a problem. Such scholars often propose "zhe" and "zher" for subject and object/possessive. But here we are just discussing situations when you are referring to an individual (i.e. a programmer or "someone" in the case above where I used the natural sounding "their") whose gender is unknown. This usage of the singular "they" happens to cover transgendered people as well.
a short summary?! i could learn python in the time it takes to read this.
It's not short by the standard of contemporary consumable Internet content, which is to be expected, as most of that content is not designed to enlighten. It's designed to catch your attention long enough to tell you about a brand, whether corporate (advertising) or personal (blogging).
And at any rate, serious writing implicitly asks for an investment of time in contemplation above and beyond line scan time, so its 'reading time' is only loosely coupled to the apparent length of the material. Making that investment increases the payoff, it doesn't dilute it. "You get out of it what you put into it."
If content consumption time is directly linearly related to content length, that's a pretty good flag that you're probably not getting much real value out of it. I've found low value content to be a difficult honeypot to resist even on HN, which is comparatively a pretty high-quality aggregator.
This is one of the best HN submissions I've ever seen. Given its due respect, it could change lives.