Hacker News Reader

Comment by ohlookabird | Hacker News Reader

Off topic, but maybe someone has an explanation to one thing that I wondered quite a few times on mailing lists and that I got reminded of by the E-mail Tatu Ylonen sent to Joyce K. Reynolds: Why is it that some people start their E-mail with "Dear Sir"? From where comes the (to me unreasonable) expectation that there is a single male person on the other end (instead of a mixed group)? Are there stereo-types at play or is this a language/translation thing?

View on HN

It would be often addressed to the head of an organisation even if they never saw it.

These days it would be proper to address it Dear Sir/Madam IF you did not know the gender of the person.

Besides that, in this case it really was pretty much all Jon Postel making the decisions.

Good story - the time that Justin Hall tried to register fuck.com in 1994.

http://www.links.net/webpub/fuck.com.html

Assuming you are not a native speaker since you mention language/translation, at the time it was a common salutation when one didn't know the name of the person(s) who would be reading your letter. Gender was not implied. Sometimes people would use "Dear Sir or Madam" but that's more clumsy.

I was always taught in school that "he/him/his" was gender neutral if there was no context indicating otherwise. People have started to get more and more annoyed by this, leading to the grammatically incorrect usage of "them/they."

Anyone who went to school or learned English in 1980s or earlier would have had learned "Dear Sir" as the standard generic salutation when writing a professional letter.

I suppose today one would start such a letter with "Dear Person." That sounds somehow disrespectful to me. There's always "To whom it may concern."

them/they as a gender neutral singular pronoun is not grammatically incorrect. Wikipedia has a rather extensive article on its history and usage. Criticism of this usage as incorrect only arose in the late 19th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

Heh, well go back to 1978-1982 and tell my English teachers that. I got dinged enough times on improper use of "them/they" that I actually learned the lesson and it still catches my eye like a flashing red light whenever I see the singular usage.

Thanks a lot for shedding some light on this mystery! I was unaware of the fact that "Dear Sir" was meant to be gender neutral at some point. While this convention seems strange to me (not a native speaker, you are right) and I assume it feels strange to women to be addressed with "Dear Sir", there seems to be more to it than my assumption of stereo-types on the sender side.

Still is neutral, and will be in the future if Star Trek is anything to go by:

KIM: Thank you, sir.

JANEWAY: Mister Kim, at ease before you sprain something. Ensign, despite Starfleet protocol, I don't like being addressed as sir.

KIM: I'm sorry, ma'am.

JANEWAY: Ma'am is acceptable in a crunch, but I prefer Captain. We're getting ready to leave. Let me show you to the bridge.

Star Trek copied the Navy (US&UK style) of addressing all senior officers as Sir, regardless of gender.

A tangent: I've always wondered why the feminist movement didn't push language more toward this direction, rather than the one we got.

"Man" was originally a gender-neutral Old English word for human beings (the gendered prefix for males being "wer", as appears in e.g. werewolf.) So why not just expand on that: demand that "man", "sir", "he", "him", "Mr"—and common nouns like "mailman", "fireman", "steward", "host", "master"—be used when referring to both men and women, and thus retroactively de-gender all previously written implicit-male-subject texts for future generations? Instead, we got "he/she", "they", "mail carrier" and "fireperson", which seems like a terrible thing to do to a previously-concise language.

Yeah, that Shakespeare guy screwed up everything when he used "they" as a singular pronoun.

The early-Modern "they" means "one or more people"—as in, it can be singular or plural, as you wish.

Shakespeare still would use "he" or "she" as appropriate when trying to make it explicit that there was exactly one person being referred to.

But now, we are told to use "they" or "he/she" even in that situation, because singular-generic "he" is offensive to some people, and because human-referential "it" is offensive to rather more people.

The current witch hunters on words seem to fail to understand that language is designed for communication between humans. It's a communication protocol.

Taking offence to a communication protocol, is like saying TCP/IP is offensive because there aren't enough of the number 7 used in the TCP/IP protocol, and it's discriminating against the equality of all numbers.

No. It's a protocol optimized for communication, not some sort of emotional playground.

To try to alter the communication protocol based on personal emotions degrades its usefulness and diminishes the ability to communicate effectively.

So now the TCP/IP packet header needs to be extended 25%, and the driver needs to ensure equal distribution of all numbers during communication, further increasing overhead by another 75%.

This is where we are headed with our language, when we allow PC politics to dictate how words should be used.

> language is designed for communication between humans.

Unlike machines, humans do not always just want to exchange factual information about the world, and often use communication for additional purposes - jockeying for status, claiming membership in groups, and yes, playing games. This can even be quite enjoyable for the humans in question, for example, mutual flirtation.

In this example, one of the bits of information that can conveyed by being a bit more thoughtful about the use of pronouns is where the human in question might fall on a scale between "I am aware that there is pervasive and systematic discrimination against one class of human, and do not wish to take even small part in it." and "I believe all relevant systematic discrimination is in the past."

Spanish is similar, so I'd imagine it's common in other languages, at least those related to English and Spanish. If gender is uncertain, for instance in the case of a mixed gender group, you just fall back to masculine adjectives, etc. I'd imagine for such practical purposes most languages would have some "default" and there are surely feminine-defaulting languages out there.

About 20 years ago, I took after my father-in-law in addressing correspondence to unknown persons with (literally) TWIMC:

I generally begin a letter or email to an unknown person or organization with "Greetings," - it is a bit informal, but I've never heard of anyone objecting to it. I never use the dreadfully stuffy "To whom it may concern".

Properly stuffy is "To all whom these presents come, greeting", common opening words of English letters patent, one of the oldest forms of "to whom it may concern" still in use.

Can be found on grants of arms and various other formal/monarchical documents up to the present day...

In English English "dear sir" is still AFAIK the formal way to address a letter to some one unknown.

To whom it may concern is some times used to make it less gendered.

I was taught "Dear Sir/Madam" at school in England around 2000.

What I was told was that "Dear Sir" should be used when writing to a specific person but they are unknown to you, whereas "To Whom it May Concern" is more appropriate if the letter could be dealt with multiple people (e.g. a department) or you expect it to be passed on to someone before being dealt with. I was also told that it's far from a hard and fast rule, and that it doesn't matter all that much.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com