But when the World needed him most, he vanished.
Tom Scott is so jacked in that video!
I kinda wish someone would come up with gender neutral singular pronouns tho. It’s kinda awkward to use they/them when referring to an individual. But we’re really far from something like that happening.
Tom Scott has a page of reflections and corrections for that video from a few years ago. He’s a good ally but I think we all envy past Tom’s optimism.
I also appreciate the thoughtfulness he showed when he found out someone he had recently collaborated with had made transphobic comments in the past.
You’re never going to appease everyone, and I appreciate that he shared the thinking that led him to his decision. I just regret not finding out about the incident until like a week after I ordered her book.
Every time I read “he or she” I think “YOU COULD HAVE SAVED FIVE CHARACTERS!!”
mad respect for counting those spaces
Programmer brain go brrrrr
{s,}he
Every byte is sacred
code.golf approves
He/she
s/he
length(“s/he”) == length(“they”)
It also just sounds awkward to say he/she
Gender neutral pronouns are just so much more convenient; I tend to use them even when I know someone’s gender. I do wish English had some common-use ones that were explicitly singular, though.
Yeah, I hate “xer” and “xe”
Dude is supposed to be gender neutral and singular.
Still, maybe don’t. Not everyone agrees with the gender neutrality of “dude”. How many dudes have you slept with?
Four. Will be five if my Grindr match pans out tonight.
Whoah! That’s a personal question I don’t feel like would reflect accurately my life if someone knew. There’s more to me than my body count. I contain depths and multitudes outside of the number of people I have slept with!
280ish. But there’s more to me than that!
Ahah, you changed it plural which genders it. It’s dudes and dudettes in that case.
Did you see that dude I slept with last night?
Totally different now that it’s a singular.
Yeah language sucks.
nah i still see “i slept with a dude” as “i slept with a man”, sorry
maybe it’s the article that makes it seem masc? A dude, vs “hey, dude!”
Well contextually you would know who the person was talking about…
If you saw a woman and confused it with a man because of word, that’s on you mate. There’s another gender neutral and singular term.
In my area “dude” is really gender neutral in most cases.
Regional dialects and all that.
Funnily enough so is “man” in a lot of cases.
For example: “Man I don’t know what’s going on anymore.” In this case “man” is less a reference to anyone in any specific way and more like an exasperation (like fuck, shit, hell, etc) and is a really common usage.
Edit: As an example of it’s gender-neutralness, “Fuck man, chill it’s just the wrong order.” In this case “man” is often used in a gender neutral way when referring to a specific person. Also man in this case can be swapped with “bro” and “dude”.
Regional dialects can get really weird in some cases, we use the same words but the meanings can be so different.
Language is a beautiful tangled knot that depending on which side you’re looking at it from it can change so much.
I do wish English had some common-use ones that were explicitly singular, though.
In the long run I predict that “they” will follow the same path as “you” - it’ll become increasingly more associated with the singular, until it’s the default interpretation. I also predict that both “they” and “you” will eventually require a pluraliser to convey the plural.
“Vos” (you, singular) in Rioplatense Spanish followed a similar path.
If that’s correct, eventually there’ll be explicitly singular second and third person pronouns.
Do we currently have an explicit pluralizer for they?
Totally agree. I think half the problem is that English is a stupid language at times. I have no problem with gender neutral terms but the plural nature of “they” makes my 54 yo brain hurt. I have the same issue with the word data. “The data are” sounds awkward to me.
You use singular they every single day or at most every single week and you have for your entire life and so did all of your English speaking ancestors including middle English.
'how far out is the pizza guy’s ‘they’re 15 minutes out’
‘my coworker was a pain in the ass today’ ‘what they’d do this time?’
‘i think my doctor is famous’ ‘oh what’s their name?’
They was singular before it was plural, and it’s singular use is still one of the most common pronouns in English.
Every example you provided was extremely unambiguous and without anything that might require distinction between singular and plural. Often language isn’t that simple. For example, “Fion had finally joined the party and they were happy about it.” Who does “they” refer to in that context? Yes, you can write/speak your way around it, but that adds extra difficulty that isn’t suited for casual speaking/writing. That is why people (who aren’t transphobes) don’t like it as a pronoun and would rather have a new word.
In your sentence they unambiguously refers to fion. It’s really not that hard for a fluent speaker. I’m not a native and this shit is simple, it’s unwritten but innately known like the order of adjectives when multiple are present.
Removed by mod
The real world uses gender neutral pronouns all the time, all over the world.
I could hear you breathing through your mouth as you typed that.
It doesn’t matter how weird a pronoun sounds to me, it’s just a word, and I shouldn’t bother so much with it, because at the end of the day,
Komi can’t communicate.
