Re: At peace with Debian (was: This is the last war...)
In muc.lists.debian.user, you wrote:
> The hand-wringing over sexist language went overboard in the 90's though
> it did straighten out alot of overtly sexist language usage that had
> straight-forward non-sexist alternatives. Unfortunately, English
> doesn't have a neutral singular personal pronoun.
Somebody should sumbit a patch.
> I have a book here,
> _The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing_, that makes a good case for using
> the plural forms "they", "them" and "their" and brings up plenty of
> historical English literature examples.
That's fine as long as the plural form of the verb is used. In
most the modern cases I see, the author just changes "he" to
"they" and leaves the verb singular. :/
> So we could rewrite the above:
>
> No professional in their right mind would use Debian on their
> business computers,
Ah good, you've chosen a verb tense that has identical
singular/plural forms. But, you've got a singular antecedent
with a plural pronoun. Change "professional" to
"professionals", and "mind" to "minds" and I'm be happy. :)
> simply because most of the responses to their posts have
> nothing to do with the question, but are nothing more than
> personal attacks.
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