Re: [OT] replacement for SystemRescueCD
Greg Wooledge wrote:
> > >>> Even though in some situations "guys" is claimed to be a
> > >>> gender-neutral word, I doubt that everyone thinks of themselves
> > >>> as a "guy". And it will be polite to those people to not make them
> > >>> choose between doing that or feeling excluded.
> [...]
> > This should be on the wiki and on the guidelines for the Debian's
> > mailing list.
> > For non-native English speakers those subtlety are hard to comprehend! :)
>
> There's no consensus for how to handle gender neutrality, even among
> native speakers. The English language isn't built for it. Every
> single approach is wrong, so basically you have to choose which
> wrongness you can tolerate.
One of the awesome and annoying things about English is that
there is no English Language Authority -- French has L'Académie
français to opine on what Is and Is Not French, but English
doesn't.
It's not just "which wrongness you can tolerate" but "which
code will be interpreted the way I want it to be interpreted".
> "It" is considered offensive, because it implies that the antecedent
> is not a person.
This is generally true, although there are probably people who
prefer it.
> "They" is grammatically horrible because it's clearly a plural pronoun,
> not a singular pronoun.
Oooch, no, sorry. That's probably what you were taught and what
you believe, but consider:
user123@randomstring.org has a problem. They told us that it
itches in all the diodes down their left side.
When you don't know a singular person's gender, they and their is
acceptable. It's been that way since the 1300s, according to
Merriam-Webster's article.
> "He/She" or "him/her" is just clumsy and awkward.
Definitely clumsy.
> "Sie" or "xie" or similar German-derived words just sound ridiculous
> and made-up, at least to those of us who don't speak German.
We have enough German-speakers on this list to chime in as to
how ridiculous "sie" is -- but I will note that it means "they".
Or "she", but not "he".
> Just try to do the best you can. Nobody has any good answers yet.
... and when someone corrects you about themselves, it's polite
to go with what they indicated. Same way it's polite to call me
"Dan" or "dsr" but not "Daniel".
-dsr- (the hyphens, I assure you, are purely decorative)
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