On Mon, Aug 09, 2004 at 08:47:57AM +0100, Telsa Gwynne wrote: > > I find it difficult to take this sort of thing seriously. It's like > > complaining about male and female connectors. > > I do not believe that is the case. Style guides do not tell > you to avoid references to male and female connectors. I'm not convinced that this is a useful data point. Sounds like a sample with a built-in bias. Anybody who writes a "style guide" obviously has an axe to grind. The opposing data point is to observe that out of all the people who are qualified to write such documents (hundreds, maybe thousands), only six have made such comments. If, for some strange reason, you're really more worried about this sort of stuff than about stuff that matters (like the documents being *crap*, which most of them are) - fix the damn spelling and grammer errors instead. Even then, you're trying to paint the house before the walls have been built. Worrying about minor details like the colloquial use of male pronouns to refer to people in general is daft. That's *obviously* not the intent of the document. Reading it that way is the fault of the reader, not the author. Prose is neither a license nor a program, and doesn't need to be read in that manner; doing so will only create problems. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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