Oh, please tell us how those evil feminist are keeping poor men oppressed… such crimes against humanity that women would insist on being treated like people.
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I love to know why you think “they/them/their” is incorrect. There are certainly those that argue such, and have for hundreds of years, but without the consensus you seem to think there is.
If anything, this highlights the fact that we need it. Language exists to serve us, no the other way around. If language does not meet our needs, we can change it, and there is no higher authority to answer to. The only strict requirement is that it is understood, which despite your protesting, you clearly do.
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stephen_schenk, you are wrong and annoyingly insistent about it. The singular they/them has been a part of the English language since the 16th century at least. The howling of all the prescriptivist grammarians in the world won’t change that. See the Oxford Dictionaries take on the matter. Try to be right before you start shouting and cursing next time.
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I structure all my technical writing to avoid any pronouns. Always have. They irritate me.
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when gender is unknown just use your own gender. if you are a girl use “she” if you are a guy use “he” what you write in your comments aren’t so important that the use of a gender specific pronoun will cause undo distress and harm production or the users who will never see it.
i think an engineer need only know how to build to a spec, he needn’t be involved in making the spec, he needn’t consider the user of the product. unless you are the engineer MAKING the spec, you have no need to care about people, just competence at writing code, past that i don’t care if you are the most misanthropic person on the face of the planet.
If the singular ‘they’ is good enough for Shakespeare, I’m sure it’s good enough for you and I and Raybert to use.
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That doesn’t really solve the problem at all - it just replaces the problematic gendered pronouns with problematic gendered names…and pronouns.
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While I try to use they/them, and I didn’t know there was a disagreement between Oxford and Chicago, there’s a simple solution on which I think all grammarians would agree:
“Users need to know that some data has already been sent, to stop them from sending it twice.”
Edited for inadvertent extra ‘s’, thanks, Gilbert.
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Well, all that needs to sort it out is an extra ‘s’ and it’s fine. Seems simple enough to me.
Well professionally, I follow the ACS style guide. Otherwise, I speak English which is a language, not a style guide, and as such is defined by the centuries-old practices of its native speakers.
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Nope. What it does is it gives you an excuse to ALTERNATE genders – Alice and Bob and Carol and so on – so things come out even.
I would fire them too, if they obstinately refused to follow perfectly harmless company policy just to be difficult. There’s making a mistake and then there’s being an asshat. I would include “being an asshat” explicitly in any list I made of fireable offenses. Forget management for a second, god knows what it’s like to work with one. Asshats bring down morale.
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How about s/he/it? That way you’ve got all your bases covered.
Empathy means knowing what another feels; sympathy means feeling what another feels. Empathy on the part of a sadistic engineer could motivate him (or her) to build something especially painful to use. Years ago, when compelled to write some documentation for a transactional system I had reconstructed, I felt sadistic enough to reverse the expected gender of all the pronouns referring to roles: supervisors got female pronouns, data-entry clerks male. Of course no one read the manual for many weeks, by which time I, a contractor, was well paid and well away. I later heard that the document floated all the way up to the CEO, who threw a fit; but it was too late.
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What about second-person singular/plural. “Y’all” is inclusive, can be specific and is gender-neutral.
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So can I use Aaron Sorkin instead of Shakespeare for my moral definitudes? Because I didn’t make good grades in school so I don’t remember if I’m supposed to poison my boss or cut out his tongue.
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Using gender-ambiguous names isn’t good enough. I recall once writing a series of user stories in a spec, and being called out for using only masculine names. The names I had chosen were, “Chris,” “Pat,” “Sandy,” “Leslie,” all of which named women in my workplace, and in fact it was Sandy that raised the complaint. Apparently, there had to be an equal number of names of each gender, and gender-ambiguous names were to be construed in whichever direction made the numbers unequal.
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Both .
It was a joke. Try reading it out loud.
