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Comment by bluesnowmonkey | Hacker News Reader

His was a universal pronoun for almost 200 years until the women's lib movement of the 1960s. Know what? A lot of dumb things happened in the 1960s. It's 2010. Let's not spend our time arguing over pronouns.

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Easy to say when you're a guy. I think it'd be pretty weird if the default pronoun for my username was 'she' or 'her'.

Please link your company & other projects in your profile so I and other tech women know we're not welcome in your efforts. Seriously. I'm done fighting sexists, I just want to know where you are so I can avoid you.

for this to work, really, we'd need another pronoun to mean "specifically male" as we have another pronoun to mean "specifically female" - "xhe" or something. Maybe then we could refer to "man" meaning human, "testicleman" meaning male, and "woman" meaning female, you know, both genders being prefixed by the reproductive organs that are specific to the gender, you know, to be fair.

Really, I think a more realistic solution is to just alternate between using 'he' and 'she' in your work; "they" grates on my ears when it's used in the singular, personally.

Just as an aside, there is a word for "specifically male man", it's "wereman" (just as "wifman", the old version of "woman" meant "specifically female man" -- "man" was short for "human", from "humanous" -- earthling, which both women and men are, despite martian/venutian assertions to the contrary...)

I learn all my etymology from Dinosaur Comics, http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=551 :)

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