Re: DevRef English writing style advice, was: incomprehensible sentence in exim4-config.pot.

[MJ Ray <mjr@phonecoop.coop>]

Christian Perrier <bubulle@debian.org> wrote:
> Such neologisms haven't been promoted very hardly and they are even
> been debated among d-w.

News to me. Can you point to a recent debate of them, please?

> Please don't take the d-w project members as a single person...:-)

I didn't. Please don't make unnecessary corrections.

[...]
> Using the radomness lead to some "he" being used...which may lead
> readers to think exactly what we want to avoid.

It will also lead to about as many "she"s being used, disproving
that unless readers are really unobservant.

> The less worse solution I've found for English, and the pronoun "he"
> is using "(s)he" which does not make the reading too clumsy as long as
> it's not repeated in each sentence. Indeed, doing it for the first
> occurrence is probably enough to just implicitely say "hey I do take
> care about gender neutrality".

You put the feminine as an optional extra in parentheses?  Ho!
Way to show equality(!) ;-)

I think that could be written "s/he" but I think it says "hey,
I'm indecisive" or, worse, "I care about political correctness
more than easy reading".

Hope that explains,
-- 
MJR/slef
http://people.debian.org/~mjr/