> Although we lately have seen the emergence of gender neutral pronoun, it is rather unpleasing to use "he/she" is an informal discussion forum when the unmarked form meaning is well understood and has been for centuries.
Singular "they" works wonders.
> Now, maybe english is not your first language
Only non-programming language, actually.
> because this was sincerely very clear and evident that this is what was meant in the message.
I disagree, and that was the entirety of my point here.
> I’ve often wondered why nobody say, talks about removing gendered pronouns altogether in formal speech instead of adding 50 new ones for instance.
'They' instead of 'he/she' is one of the things people actually use, and it's exactly dropping the gendered pronoun in favor of an existing neutral pronoun. It's strictly simpler and smaller language. My teenage kids use this construction a lot and I'm getting used to it.
> I really don't like the singular use of "they" as it was drummed into my head in 12 grades of English classes that it was wrong,
Yeah, that's the sad thing. At some point we decided that gender neutral pronouns were less favorable, and then taught generations of people not to use them, a couple hundred years before a big cultural mixup where it would have been very useful to have. I was lucky enough to always feel it was appropriate and that the recommendations to not use it were shortsighted. This came about when there was a shift towards people saying we should use "she" instead of "he" for generically referring to a person, but that just seemed silly to me, why would we shift from incorrectly addressing roughtly 50% of the population in writing to incorrectly addressing the other roughly 50% of people, when we could just use "they" and do away with that specific pronoun problem in an accurate and even handed way?
Given an HN reader took the trouble to email me their thanks for my comment, I respectfully disagree. To do this, they had find my email address by following some of my other comments, linking to a website, following through to github... The email they wrote was articulate. They put in real effort to say "thanks".
> "he" is a gender neutral pronoun when referring to a person of unspecified gender (as in other languages).
In some dictionaries, yes. A possible counter-argument to this is that the tradition of that usage comes from cultures with significant inbuilt misogyny.
Agreed. I dislike this form. A similar option is to alternate use of "he" and "she". This form is common, and probably the simplest. I wish I'd suggested it.
> we can argue that it is misandrous because you're capitalizing the "S" and prioritizing "She" over "he"
> Furthermore I suspect this is less about he/him vs she/hers but some of the more esoteric pronoun preferences.
Is that the case here? I would think it is a bit too avantgardist to expect people to contort their sentences to include singular pronouns beyond he/she/they at this point. I get the impression that those esoteric made-up pronouns tend to be mostly used for straw-men arguments.
> If you use a pronoun that can apply to multiple subjects or objects in a sentence, it will always be ambiguous.
My point exactly. There's nothing inherently unique about singular "they" in that respect.
Sure, there are certain circumstances in which a gendered pronoun removes ambiguity, just as honorifics or age/social status based pronouns would remove ambiguity in many instances involving multiple male subjects/objects if English used them (like some other languages do), but that really isn't a reason not to use singular "they" with the same degree of care to avoid ambiguity one also has to use "he" and "she".
> I'd have no objection to a singular gender-neutral word (which unfortunately doesn't exist in English).
Yes it does. "He" is the gender neutral expression in English and has been since forever. It's just that politically correct people get bent out of shape about it.
> Yes, it intentionally uses the feminine third-person, but I guess it makes a point about inclusion this way.
I end up feeling suspicious of an author that uses she about ~75% of the time since it seems they remember to use it more often when referring to people in a customer/student/etc role or with an example question/mistake, yet more often use he or avoid pronouns when referring to an expert or people with titles.
Meanwhile, they works perfectly fine, if it confuses someone that is their problem and if I said her problem there it would be because I was sexist for one reason and his for another. :)
> any document that exclusively uses masculine pronouns for genderless subjects reads as outdated.
Correct English is never out of style.
Different languages do different things, and that's okay. Some languages apply grammatical gender to more than just sex, e.g. tools, or fruit. That's okay. English uses grammatical gender to distinguish between male, female & neuter objects, and defaults to male when referring to unknown males-or-females. That's okay too. It's all part of the rich panoply of life.
> By referring to “the user” as “he”, you’re already distracting roughly 50% of your potential readership
I really doubt every woman is distracted by proper grammar. And of course by not using correct English, you distract people who use & prefer it.
> I am not a native English speaker as you can probably tell
yeah, i figured. i hope my post did not come off too harshly.
> "user should click on the button so she can access the hidden page"
historically the masculine "he", "man", "mankind" has been used to refer to all people in english, but it's not quite gender-neutral. in the last fifty years or so, some authors have used "she" instead to be more inclusive, but best practice today is to use "they" when gender is not known. just FYI.
> What they are saying is that switching from "he" to "they" is simple and easy
I get that and if I remember to use it, I will, but when I instinctively do not use it, because well, "he" still comes more naturally to me than "they", it should not be assumed that I am sexist, bigoted etc. because I made a particular choice of words that can be reasonably interpreted as not meant to explicitly exclude people, unless they're looking for it.
> will make life better for many people
It's true that it may make them feel better, if they're looking at every use of a gendered pronoun from a "it's sexist" perspective, but I'd argue that's unproductive and not really making their life any better in a meaningful way
> It's correct English
That's good, but that doesn't mean that it's "intuitive" English for everyone and they shouldn't feel bad for it.
> Today, young English speakers are trying to popularize "they" as an English neuter pronoun, and it's not too absurd: we already use "they" this way when the gender of the person is unknown.
I can understand why 'they' is chosen as a way to introduce neutrality of gender but it pains me that this also introduces of ambiguity of plurality. We _really_ need a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun. We're lucky that our first and second-person pronouns and our plural pronouns by fluke of language evolution just happen to already be gender neutral. It's just this last one -- third-person singular -- that is causing all this discussion, political fights, and newspaper column inches. It seems absurd to me when we could just call each other ze/zim (or whatever, the actual word doesn't really matter) and call it a day. If it turns out that the only way we can shut up about pronouns is to sacrifice 'they', then I guess that's an acceptable loss. But it does feel like all we need is a tiny tweak of the language to iron out this wrinkle by introducing something new (or taking one from another language, if that's more palatable).
> I have a hard time believing that you never used or heard of English's ubiquitous gender-neutral pronoun.
Does it help my case if I confess English isn't my first language :D ?
> You use "they" all the time in your comment history for genderless entities like Apple and TechCrunch (didn't want to scroll further). Some could say this is the plural pronoun, like when people pluralize "Radiohead {is->are} a good band", but since you do use "is" in these contexts, you are indeed quite familiar with the singular "they".
I do indeed use `they` in the plural form when referring to genderless entities. When I write (or say) 'They are a tech company' I am picturing a group of people and this picture stands up for the Apple concept in that context. So far it has always been the meaning behind my usage of the word. And more problematic is the fact that I understand the usage of `they` to always be the plural pronoun even when it's not appropriate.
From your example: `Radiohead is a good band` means to me we are talking of the band in general and `Radiohead are a good band` means we are talking about the people in it. Now it gets funnier when talking about the Rolling Stones.
> And if you consume any English at all (as you certainly do on HN and Reddit), you see it daily.
> you are indeed quite familiar with the singular "they"
I'd chalk it up to `monkey see, monkey do`. I rarely see the words `they is` but those examples:
"I swear more when I'm talking to a boy, because I'm not afraid of shocking them". From an interview.[1]
"No mother should be forced to testify against their child".
I understand the first example (`them`) to be about boys in general, not about the `a boy` from the first part of the sentence. Now the second one I would assume `their` is used because a mother can have more than one child. But I would equally find normal to use the singular `her child` and think it means the same but with a more personal nuance (the woman we are talking about maybe ? not women in general).
After reading that I hit up Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Prescription_of_... and that example "Somebody left their umbrella in the office. Would they please collect it?" got me ashamed because I had to admit to myself that until now I understood that kind of statement to be derogatory. It also made a lot of things much clearer.
> It might seem like I'm making a big deal about nothing, but more and more often I'm starting to see a certain reality revisionism that makes me feel like I'm being gaslit by the people around me.
Well, I certainly can understand that. But I assure you there are no deceiving intentions on my end. `Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.`
People learn language in an organic way. Misinterpretations happens all the time (see that recent Trump-Macron army thing).
It was certainly eye-opening for me to read that yesterday and funny to see this topic mentioned again today.
I have another example, I recently learned that `to couch travel` means to travel in a bus. I talked about it with a friend of mine and he clearly remembers learning that in our English lesson 20 years ago (we were in the same class).
> invoke their sex or gender would mean I was making a point based on those features
No, it wouldn’t. It would mean you were writing comprehensible English. You’re not “invoking” anything by using “she” to refer to a woman in the third person. That’s what the pronoun is for. Your use of “they” is weird and jarring.
>As far as I am aware 'he' has two meanings in common parlance, one gender neutral and one specifically referring to males.
That works, if you were educated before 1960: "The use of he to refer to a person of unknown gender was prescribed by manuals of style and school textbooks from the early 18th century until around the 1960s" [1]
The thing is, you have read, most of your life, seeing male pronouns. I was a young teenage girl when I realised this and it made me feel left out, like I'd never be relevant. Acknowledging half the population is a good start - I like those programming books for example where Alice and Bob are equally represented.
> the neutral pronoun is equally correct from an English language perspective
The neutral pronoun in English is 'it,' and using it to refer to a human being is always wrong.
The use of singular they is in a few contexts correct, but in many more contexts incorrect. The use of 'he-or-she' is inelegant and incorrect, and the use of generic she is less incorrect than silly.
Seriously, this is remarkably silly. 'Girl' in German is a neutral word, but no-one would say that German girls think of themselves as genderless. 'He' in English is normally the correct word to use generically; no-one sane would say that English-speakers think everyone is male.
(for that matter, the English word 'man' actually is genderless: the English word for a male human being is 'were,' as in werewolf — it's cognate to Latin 'vir')
>English is not structured to be gender-neutral. I'm not going to use awkward circumlocutions to avoid the possibility of offending someone.
Using singular they is hardly a "circumlocution", I do it without thinking about it. It's not hard to learn once you actually decide to take responsibility for your own speech.
And it's not a "possibility of offending", it's a "certainty of papercuts". If you habitually use male pronouns you will inevitably refer to women with them, and they will most likely be put off by your apparent assumption.
> The person who corrected the original commenter seems to recognized that "he" was being used in a gender-neutral way and even offered the use of "they"
Their first suggestion was to use the correct gender-specific pronoun, and then they said that alternately a gender-neutral one could have been used. I don't think it was understood as gender-neutral.
> The fact that we can find another word that unambiguously removes gender from the subject means that gender is irrelevant to the comment in question entirely
Sure, but if it's read as gender-specific then it's still a factual mistake. Would you be so defensive about someone correcting a wrong, but not critically important, date?
Singular "they" works wonders.
> Now, maybe english is not your first language
Only non-programming language, actually.
> because this was sincerely very clear and evident that this is what was meant in the message.
I disagree, and that was the entirety of my point here.
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