âFiremanâ is deprecated? I still use it, as well as steward/stewardess, waiter/waitress, actor/actress, mailman, chairman, and all sorts of these gendered nouns.
Could someone explain the reasoning behind alternatives to âtheyâ, âthemâ, and âtheirâ? Those are already effectively neuter.
The preferred term is âfirefighterâ, although I have no problem with calling a male firefighter a âfiremanâ and a female firefighter a âfirewomanâ.
Sadly âaviatrixâ has gone away.
I think Iâll keep using dude, dude and dudes for all humans.
Yes, I notice that people are already commonly using âthey/them/theirâ even for singular to create a gender-neutral or gender-unspecified pronoun.
Another problem with âxeâ is that the Vancouver area has a large ethnic Chinese population. When Chinese is written in Latin characters, the âshâ sound is written as âxâ. I know a Chinese woman named Xi, pronounced âsheâ. They will see âxeâ and pronounce it as âsheâ as well.
We donât have the equivalent of the Academie Francaise. Language changes arise organically, they canât be imposed. Instead, the Vancouver school board should tell teachers to stop correcting students for using âtheyâ as singular when the clear intent is to avoid writing he/she, âhe or sheâ, or âheâ to refer to any person.
Be cause prescriptivists insist that âtheyâ is plural.
Anyway, my mid-90s era Politically-Correct-to-English dictionary lists âcoâ as the preferred gender free English pronoun. Anyway, these pronouns arenât exactly genderless as much as transgendered. No one is intending â nor expecting â the cisgendered to start referring âxemselvesâ as âxeâ. This is for transgendered people who do not want to use either preĂ«xisting pronoun.
Zee Germans are coming!
Isnât it likely this fails because thereâs always two types of people in any differentiated class:
- he/she who wants to be just like everyone else
- xe/xem/xyr who want to be different than that class
And these arguments always rage because/inbetween in-groups and out-groups, when scaled up to cultural significance become xenophobic due to natural human tendencies?
WaitâŠwhat were we discussing?
Aviatrix always struck me as a bit too close to dominatrix for use in polite company.
I always thought âcomedienneâ was stupid.
Iâve always loved the word.
Exactly, this is why prescriptivism, no matter how well-intentioned it may be, makes no sense from a linguistic perspective. Iâve always found these language modification campaigns to be misguided, at best.
Australian science fiction author Greg Egan has multiple books with non-gendered characters in them. He uses: ver, ve and vis:
Him/Her/Ver
He/She/Ve
His/Hers/Vis
The prescriptivists are several hundred years out of date (OED): â2 [ singular ] used to refer to a person of unspecified sexâ since at least the 16th century.
But heâre a prescription for Cory: trasgender not transgendered, just like not lesbianed, blacked, or boyed.
There are countries out there who have to deal with languages which feature entire systems of gender behind their words. I wonder if they see anything like this level of arguing over gendered language.
Aviatrix is an awesome word, and I still think Amy Johnson should have gone on the new ÂŁ10 note instead of Jane Austen.
I was going to point out that Xe is what Blackwater renamed themselves (which they did), but apparently they changed their name to Academi in 2011.
Iâm just going to stick with they.
This ^^^
Singular they was in use for hundreds of years before it became fashionable for the singular/plural agreement to be more important than avoidance of gender disagreement in the 19th century.
There isnât so much a need to invent a new, genderless pronoun, as to recognize that we had a perfectly good one all along, that was simply unfashionable for about a century.
/me lifts a glass to offer a toast
To all the aviatrices who were pioneers not only in aviation, but for the cause of gender equality.
âFirefighterâ is a better name for the job they do anyway. They fight fires. A âfiremanâ is just a man who has something to do with fire, and used to be applied to many jobs (such as shoveling coal into a train engine). So the reason the change has been so successful goes beyond gender neutrality.
