I always get so confused when 'they' is used for a single person. Is there any alternative? Everything seems to sound silly
i knew a trans person whose preferred pronoun was 'it'. i just used its first name.
The Trans History of the Wild West
31–40 of 71 posts
Re: The Trans History of the Wild West
#32I always get so confused when 'they' is used for a single person. Is there any alternative? Everything seems to sound silly
You get used to it with practice. More enbies[1] are coming out in more places, so you'll get there.
[1] Nonbinary -> NB -> enby
See also: nibbling.
Re: The Trans History of the Wild West
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
For my money the best thing that ever happened to English was abandoning grammatical gender/noun classes centuries ago - no more masculine, feminine or neuter, everything is ‘the’ or ‘a’.[0] Based on that, I propose we push for ‘it’ as a sole singular pronoun (and keep ‘they’ for plural, as knowing if someone is referring to one or many is far more useful in almost all contexts than knowing whether they are referring…
The problem with "it" is the word's existing use to refer to non-person objects. One could easily interpret being called "it" as an insult, ie: this thing is not even a human. I might not even be willing to refer to a dog as "it" in most circumstances. Honestly though, I'm with you that it's a linguistic gap English needs to fill. Similarly, the second person plural pronoun need to be accepted as "y'all"- and I say t…
I still don't understand what's the problem with simply using "you" as second-person plural pronoun, most of the time it's perfectly clear from the context whether it's singular or plural. And if not, there's also "everybody" or "everyone".
In German we have "sie" which is both third-person singular female, third-person plural, and when written "Sie" also a formal second-person singular/plural. It works just fine.
Re: The Trans History of the Wild West
#34I always get so confused when 'they' is used for a single person. Is there any alternative? Everything seems to sound silly
Good blog post on the subject here: https://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/singular-t...
TL;DR it's been commonly used this way for centuries, all the way back to Shakespeare and even earlier.
There are alternatives, xe/xer/xem, but you can't wish new English words into existence even if they might be useful. You end up sounding sillier trying to use the new made-up words than if you just resign yourself to "they".
And can I add that this comments thread here is peak HN. There's a fascinating article about an interesting part of history I'd never heard of before, and yet all but one of the comments here are nitpicking over word choice. And I'm not helping any either.
Re: The Trans History of the Wild West
#35I always get so confused when 'they' is used for a single person. Is there any alternative? Everything seems to sound silly
Good blog post on the subject here: https://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/singular-t... TL;DR it's been commonly used this way for centuries, all the way back to Shakespeare and even earlier. There are alternatives, xe/xer/xem, but you can't wish new English words into existence even if they might be useful. You end up sounding sillier trying to use the new made-up words than if you just resign yourself t…
I managed to learn Spivak pronouns because I knew someone who used them, but that didn't make it easy.
Re: The Trans History of the Wild West
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
This shouldn’t surprise you. Most people can infer gender from visual appearance alone with well over 99.99% accuracy without being explicitly told. If you know their name and other gendered indicators, it would be a marked anomaly NOT to know their gender.
I can also guess people's height to within an inch or two, but I can still have an abstract conversation about a friend-of-a-friend I've never met, without expecting to be (constantly!) told how tall they are unless it's relevant to the story. So in terms of the order we learn things about people we've never met (when it's not directly relevant), we expect gender much earlier than many other attributes. It mostly ref…
I misunderstood your point. I thought you found it remarkable that we expected to be able to discern gender quite quickly. In any case, I don’t know how much our gendered language indicates our values as a society, probably that gender is just information-dense (lots of behavior correlates strongly with gender) such that many languages evolved gender as a utility (and indeed English actually lost much of its grammatical gender though probably not because the density of information was lower in English-speaking societies, but rather due to massive influxes of non-native speakers which had a broader simplifying effect on the language).
Re: The Trans History of the Wild West
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with "it" is the word's existing use to refer to non-person objects. One could easily interpret being called "it" as an insult, ie: this thing is not even a human. I might not even be willing to refer to a dog as "it" in most circumstances. Honestly though, I'm with you that it's a linguistic gap English needs to fill. Similarly, the second person plural pronoun need to be accepted as "y'all"- and I say t…
True, which is why it needs to start with people choosing to be called ‘it’. It's yet to happen, but I'll do my bit if/when I'm ever asked for my preferred pronouns. Also, as someone currently leaving in a place rich with Scousers I would put forward ‘yous’ as a second-person plural pronoun that rolls off the tongue a bit better (and, I would conjecture, makes more intuitive sense for learners of English).
I have encountered a few people who use it/its pronouns.
Re: The Trans History of the Wild West
#38I always get so confused when 'they' is used for a single person. Is there any alternative? Everything seems to sound silly
For my money the best thing that ever happened to English was abandoning grammatical gender/noun classes centuries ago - no more masculine, feminine or neuter, everything is ‘the’ or ‘a’.[0] Based on that, I propose we push for ‘it’ as a sole singular pronoun (and keep ‘they’ for plural, as knowing if someone is referring to one or many is far more useful in almost all contexts than knowing whether they are referring…
The well-known mathematician M Spivak is amoung those who has suggested 'e' (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun).
Somehow the deliberate proposals often seem not to succeed.
Re: The Trans History of the Wild West
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
This shouldn’t surprise you. Most people can infer gender from visual appearance alone with well over 99.99% accuracy without being explicitly told. If you know their name and other gendered indicators, it would be a marked anomaly NOT to know their gender.
I can also guess people's height to within an inch or two, but I can still have an abstract conversation about a friend-of-a-friend I've never met, without expecting to be (constantly!) told how tall they are unless it's relevant to the story. So in terms of the order we learn things about people we've never met (when it's not directly relevant), we expect gender much earlier than many other attributes. It mostly ref…
But gender has a much more significant affect on how someone acts than their height, and significantly affects what kind of relationship you could have with that person.
Re: The Trans History of the Wild West
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's kind of odd, because people seem to accept singular "they" for strangers, but not once there's a name. If I say: "I bumped into a stranger on the street and trod on their toes, apologised to them, and they apologised to me" - generally (in normal spoken conversation, not here when we're paying attention) people don't care. Using singular "they" for strangers is pretty common, and hundreds and hundreds of years o…
This shouldn’t surprise you. Most people can infer gender from visual appearance alone with well over 99.99% accuracy without being explicitly told. If you know their name and other gendered indicators, it would be a marked anomaly NOT to know their gender.
I can also infer race from visual appearance with similar accuracy, but if I say "Can you hand this to that black person" would be super weird and quite likely objectionable, even if I was correct that the person was black. And nobody would want abbreviated pronouns on race - "I talked to whim and whe said to talk to blim" just seems sort of ... overly concerned with people's races.
It's a linguistic quirk of English that "Can you hand this to [that female person]" is accepted and natural. On first principles it shouldn't be.
(It is interesting IMO that Japanese has a pronoun for "she," and it's a compound word that literally translates as "that woman." It only developed as a pronoun in the last century or so, from the influence of Weatern works which had he/she or equivalent pronouns.)