But if I have nothing of substance to add to the point? “This. Also…”? I don’t have a Cybertruck or know anyone that does; I can’t comment on their quality.
Besides, it wasn’t even particularly important to me, just a quick aside. If I care deeply about making people use “they” for inclusion reasons, I’d have written more than a sentence.
I’m not sure they ever doubled down on it.
They didn’t. Hence my insistence: the original comment probably wasn’t intentional as such, nor do I ascribe any malice.
Plenty other people felt the need to ascribe intent, however. That’s what I don’t understand - why are people so eager to defend a phrasing and potential intent without ever consulting the original commenter?
I just don’t want to limit how people express themselves
I made a suggestion and argument why I find “they” better, without ideological insistence or being forceful about it. There’s no limiting going on.
Its more important to me that someone express themselves honestly rather than they are politically correct.
The above note and specific context aside, I don’t categorically agree. While reasonable argument should be the first resort, there are honest sentiments rejecting reasonable argument that deserve no expression, no space and no opportunity to spread hateful rhetoric. I think it’s more important to foster a tolerant environment, suppressing intolerance if necessary to preserve that environment, than to grant universal freedom even to enemies of freedom.
Again, this probably doesn’t apply here - I doubt the original comment made a point of exclusion. We’re getting way off topic here when all I wanted was to offer an alternative argument for inclusive phrasing.
Some horse fly blankets and hoods have a zebra pattern, probably for the same reason.
I wasn’t strictly meaning to correct so much as point out a reason why it’s more concise. I value the inclusive motivation too, if that was hard to tell; I just think there is another reason even if you don’t care about inclusion.
It seems a lot of people are actively opposed to it though, not sure why. I’m just asking questions, you know?
😉
I wanted to offer a suggestion I felt is better for two independent reasons. I didn’t say “you should have said”, simply wrote why I consider the more inclusive they more convenient too.
I don’t think there was any active “want” behind that way of writing so much as habit (“how the person talks”). Somehow a lot of people seem bent on opposing that suggestion though, and while I don’t want to make assumptions, I’m starting to think it isn’t out of some deep disdain for convenience.
Not an intentional expression, no. If I say something out of habit without thinking, that’s out of affect, not intent. If I then double down on that habit when asked about it, it’s an intentional expression.
Maybe I came across too strongly in my first comment, but it was really just meant to be a comment on how “they” is more convenient on top of being more inclusive as a suggestion, not as an attack. I think it’s better to use it for two otherwise unrelated reasons, and put forth the one not hinging on ideology.
I am confused, yes. You’d either have to be stubborn about not changing habits or so opposed to inclusiveness that you’d rather write something longer to intentionally exclude. I didn’t want to assume either and just chalked it up to habit and wanted to suggest an alternative.
That’s a habit, not an intent. You implied that there were some deeper intent behind using “he or she” over the shorter and more inclusive “they”. Of course people are allowed to write however they want to, and they’re free to ignore my suggestion. I’m wondering why people are so bent on pushing back against it - what is it about my remark that turned this whole thing into such an involved discussion?
Yes, of course, nothing wrong there. I’m asking what’s wrong with using “they” instead, given that there seems to be some pushback
Nice ditty.
Thank you :)
Regional dialect, fluidity of language, variety - even habit.
Those explain why it might be the first thing people reach to, but I wasn’t trying to demonise that. I was trying to offer an argument for the alternative that I consider both more convenient to write and read and more inclusive. Habits can be changed.
Oh, I do respectfully disagree with that, especially when you cite medieval English but reference an American language dictionary as your source.
Does the nature of the source invalidate the content and points it makes? English is still English, and I was looking for a source that wasn’t Wikipedia, but also was publically accessible. I could have just copied all of Wikipedia’s references, but most of them are books or journals that I don’t expect people to have access to and didn’t individually check. We could debate here what burden of proof is to be expected in an online debate, but I didn’t think the matter to be worth serious discussion.
The point is the same: there are plenty of historical examples of it being used. To be clear, this is a pre-emptive counterargument to a point I’ve occasionally seen made: That the singular they was a new invention and should be rejected on that ground. If past usage has no bearing on your current decision, that argument obviously holds no weight.
In the latter case, I contend that the increasing spread, particularly in the context of that spread, legitimises its use for that purpose. I fall in with the descriptivists: Rules should describe contemporary usage, not prescribe it.
Ultimately, I believe using “they” for gender neutrality is more inclusive for identities outside the binary. I consider the difference in usage trivial enough that the difference in respect justifies it.
And which intent would warrant using “he or she” rather than “they”?
Then the original comment would read
hose hings are very poorly made and all he most imporan pars are made of cheap plasic ha an average person can lierally rip off wih his or her bare hands
True, but this isn’t prose or high literature. What reason do you suggest why “his or her” would be preferable to “their” in this context?
The prescriptivist “It’s grammatically incorrect” argument doesn’t hold much water when it has been used since middle English.
In a poem, I can see the thought:
“I tried to fit the cadence of this clause
Within the measure of this poem’s form
Which has in past and present be the norm
By which this poem, too, seeks to adhere.
This is my authorial choice’s cause
for my decision not to use a “their”.”
But if to find an alternate way to word
Your writing’s pronouns strikes you as absurd
I nonetheless opine that you still ought
To make the token effort to include
With “their” all people by the same respect
That you for yourself would from them expect.
Refusing this, I feel, would be quite rude.
When it’s built around lage aggregators, running which privately is rather hard, there’s a bias in favour of centralised, large operators thereof, which mitigates some of the advantages.
“their” is shorter than “his or her”
(Even if you don’t care about gender inclusiveness, they is just more convenient)
If discourse and argument fail to quell the intolerant, a tolerant society must be willing to use censorship and even violence to defend itself. If we let them trample all over our values, tolerating them for the sake of being the “better person”, we’ll be the better corpse sooner rather than later and history will remember us “Look how nobly they did nothing!”
If our history is ever written, that is.
That’s the other option, of course: If your employees are happy, they don’t need to form a union to press complaints.
If you do not act you are not absolved of morality because you had a choice. You made a choice and your morals were tested.
You hold the opinion that deliberate inaction is an action in itself, that the worth of lives can be quantified and from that conclude that a failure to reduce a loss in life is tantamount to condemning those lives to death. That conclusion is valid under those premises, but the point of the dilemma is that not everybody agrees with those premises.
…what kind of cup? Does a Crema + double Espresso count as one or as three?
It would be Musical Roulette essentially
It’s even older: The myth of individual excellence is at least as old as the phenomenon of a distinct class of a warrior aristocracy. All throughout history, you’ll see the elite (as most historians and poets were, because a peasant working for subsistence doesn’t have the time to write deep musings about that time he got conscripted for war and stood in a line with all the other common peasants) writing of this or that great general or warrior, despite most of just about everything being done by groups.
You might know about the great heroes of the Iliad, excelling in battle by taking down a key figure of the opposing side, but most people probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the mass of “common” infantry on either side, let alone about the servants carrying the hoplites’ stuff.
You might find a lot of medieval works focused on the glory and honor of a knight, but the (comparatively) poor spear-and-shield conscripts receive attention mostly in official documents detailing the way their army was to be raised (see the section “Ninth-Century Rohirrim” here).
Even when thinking about heavy cavalry charges, for the longest time I never gave much thought to the value of coordinated cohesion between them. The knights’ charge is still a group effort, where an isolated warrior - great hero or not - would be doomed. And while we may be aware that knights had a squire, the rest of the retinue wouldn’t be clear to everyone:
(Citation copied from this entry of the same blog as before)
Ever since there has been an elite with the leisure to write and document, served by a lower class who didn’t, there has been a tendency to emphasise these elites’ individual value and omit the group effort of all the invisible people contributing to that value.
I don’t know if that is the cultural inspiration for the modern trend of focusing on single individuals or simply a symptom of a similar cause, but there is a certain resemblance that I suspect isn’t pure coincidence.