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Comment by molf | Hacker News Reader

“Authorette”, really? What is wrong with the word “author”?

I'm smart enought to understand and read over it. It doesn't hurt me at all.

The only issue i have is, that apparently i'm unable to find a dictionary which writes it like this. 'Authorette' links to twitter accounts and blogs and twitch.

LOL.

I wonder what proportion of replies to comments on forums right now revolves around the usage of language in regard to subjective views over identity, as opposed to the actual content of the comment. I don’t support linguistic prescription at all, but maybe it would be a good thing to do away with all grammatical gender in the English language, if only to make people like you stop commenting on things.

GP pointed out that GP made up a (diminutive-sounding) word that isn’t even a word just to highlight the completely irrelevant fact that the article was written by a woman, and you think the problem is that English language pronouns are gendered?

My point is that such discussions are subjective, inconsequential and also irrelevant to the topic. Most commenters on HN would mention the ‘tangential/orthogonal’ nature of a similarly irrelevant comment.

The Turkish language has no indication of gender in pronouns or suffixes. My claim is that if English were the same, commenters like above would comment less.

HN isn’t a political platform. People come here for information and discussion on relevant topics.

> HN isn’t a political platform.

And calling out bad grammar is not political. (However unhelpful it may be.)

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