Re: At peace with Debian (was: This is the last war...)
On Sunday 14 July 2002 05:36 pm, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 14, 2002 at 05:24:39PM -0700, David Wright wrote:
> > Guess what: no matter how much you agonized over it when you were
> > young first discovered feminism, you can't eliminate the "generic
> > masculine" construction in English without distracting your reader
> > or being wrong.
>
> So let's improve English so that you can (not necessarily using a
> plural form; other ways have been suggested). It's not like it's a
> dead language, after all.
>
Well, "their" has been acceptable for both neuter and plural usage (||
not &&) for most of the history of the language, so it's more a case of
"rolling back a buggy patch" than improvement. I personally find it no
more distracting than seeing "colour" spelt wrongly ;-)
- Derek
> (Yes, I know, this is a "go ahead and try it and see how far you get"
> question, but surely we are a group that tries to fix things rather
> than work around them? :) Excuse me while I go and tilt at this
> windmill over here ...)
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