11–20 of 44 posts
Wasn’t that easy?
So now you either need to ask a user for their name and preferred pronoun, or just refer to them as "they".
printf("%d %s in your cart",x,(x==1) ? "item" : "items");
0 items
1 item
2 items
Wasn’t that easy? No, because there are a reasonably large number of people, especially in Starbucks' home town, who want to be referred to as ze, zer, or one of a number of other gender-neutral, recently-minted pronouns. http://www.warren-wilson.edu/~writingcenter/Gender-Neutral_L... So now you either need to ask a user for their name and preferred pronoun, or just refer to them as "they".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Gender-neutral_la...
and
http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Singula...
Using the singular-they seems to be completely acceptable and preferable to the alternatives provided by the author.
The author's solution about using the first name of the person should be the standard across the board. It hurts to read these sentences as much as reading bad code.
For every Starbucks messing up he/she/they, I can count 10 websites that can't get this right: printf("%d %s in your cart",x,(x==1) ? "item" : "items"); 0 items 1 item 2 items I could swear eBay printed "1 items" for the first decade of it's existence.
Redeeming your eGift couldn't be easier. All you need to do is:
1. Redeem your eGift
2.
3.
"Matt Hofstadt wanted to make your day so Matt sent you..." is uglier and less pleasant to read than the version with "they've". I don't see any argument in the article for what's actually wrong with using "they" - sure, it violates one of English's alleged rules, but the author acknowledges that those rules don't actually matter. (Personally I think women should insist on being called "he" - "she" is a grammatical d…
Wasn’t that easy? No, because there are a reasonably large number of people, especially in Starbucks' home town, who want to be referred to as ze, zer, or one of a number of other gender-neutral, recently-minted pronouns. http://www.warren-wilson.edu/~writingcenter/Gender-Neutral_L... So now you either need to ask a user for their name and preferred pronoun, or just refer to them as "they".
"In a case like the generic email I got from Starbucks where the gender of the purchaser is likely unknown, the solution is even easier. Try this little programmatic trick:
[$first_name] [$last_name] wanted to make your day so [$first_name] sent you a $20.00 USD Starbucks Card eGift to spend on your favorite beverage."
Also, what is "especially in Starbucks' home town" supposed to mean?
For every Starbucks messing up he/she/they, I can count 10 websites that can't get this right: printf("%d %s in your cart",x,(x==1) ? "item" : "items"); 0 items 1 item 2 items I could swear eBay printed "1 items" for the first decade of it's existence.
you'll have to revisit that for localization, you could use ngettext or similar right away.
That's entirely and entirely typically wrong. Singular "they" has been well-established in English for centuries. The great writers have always used it freely—that includes Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Dickens, Oscar Wilde, and seemingly everybody else. "A person can't help their birth," says Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair. (Edit: it's fun to dig up these classical examples, because they sound so modern and fresh. "Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes"—Wilde. "It's enough to drive anyone out of their senses"—Shaw. "Everybody does and says what they please"—Byron.)
The ironic thing is that the "rule" about generic "he" (and later, "he or she" and all the other stilted variants) was fabricated by grammarians who looked at how English actually worked, said "Goodness no that can't be right because Latin doesn't do that", and started telling everybody their grammar was wrong.
(Notice how I just used singular "they". Should I have said, "telling everybody his grammar was wrong"? Or "his or her", or "his/er", or just "her", if you're one of those? Or, to adapt the OP's suggestion, "telling everybody everybody's grammar was wrong"?)
People never stopped using it, though, and by 1850 the grammarians were so indignant about this that they petitioned the British Parliament to make "he" the legal standard. And people kept on using "they", because it works.
Edit: There are so many sources on this that you can't kick Google without stirring some up, but http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/singular-th... and http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/sgtheirl.html are particularly good and http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002748.h... is hilarious.