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Comment by tasogare | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully I’m living in a place where this pronoun thing have not been imported, but if someone is ever trying to bully me with his invented words (acknowledging self-declared gender with existing ones is totally fine, using "hir" is not), I’ll ask for reciprocity and I’ll impose the use of a made up pronouns that contains some of my favorite writing systems (they’re all logographic) and a few Unicode characters outside BMP. If they don’t want to play that game, why should I play theirs? It will be an easy way to uncover a lot of hypocrisy.

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Come on, new words are created all the time. What do you call the grade before “1” in old English? Didn’t exist. The word is a loan word from German.

Language changes to suit the users of the language. Taking a hardline “you made words up so I’m going to retaliate to make words up” is no doubt fun rhetoric online but to do so in the real work... just makes you an asshole.

Why calling someone by their preferred names and pronouns is so difficult is beyond me. If your friend said “I’d prefer if you didn’t call me dick, please call me Richard” surely you’d grant such a trivial to you, yet important to them request.

Despite internet memes to the contrary, the use of very new pronouns (such as xie) is not super common. I’ve never seen someone get upset at being called “them”. Or structure your conversation and avoid pronouns: it’s super easy. I can’t remember names so I talk in such a way as to avoid names. Since pronouns and names fit in the same place syntactically, I can also magically talk to someone without using pronouns.

> Why calling someone by their preferred names and pronouns is so difficult is beyond me.

Read me again. If someone wants to be called he or she I have no problem with that. What is totally ridiculous is coming with things like hir or xeir which are made-up pronouns. The real assholes are the people coming with this crap and force them in other people throat.

The last part of your post is disconnected from reality. It’s not my job to contrive my speech to avoid pronouns in languages where they are mandatory. You also contradict yourself since you used "I" a lot in a sentence advocating the removal of pronouns.

Fix your heart.

There is a point at which empathy does not supercede the mental and societal burden required to appease people

Fix your grammar.

English is the only foreign language I can read where I routinely have to pause to wonder and read sentences again to be sure of what’s going on because of purposely messed up pronoun usage. Normally I’m lucky as the rules are the same as my native language (his encompass both genders when speaking of a group). However recently I’ve come across usage such as singular they and even more striking ‘her’ to encompass both gender. This bugs me out each time, not because I’m trying to be offended of everything I read (that’s an easy game...) but because if a text is deviating from convention it’s normally to put the focus or emphasis on something. In the case of her for example, this screams "warning: in this sentence the human under discussion is a woman and this is a very relevant fact for the understanding of the text". So I naturally start paying more attention to that. Except it’s not an important detail at all so it doesn’t need any attention whatsoever. This is the infuriating thing. The most ridiculous recent example of this I read was a technical document written by a Microsoft employee, where her was used as the default generic pronoun for programmers... I took me a few seconds to realize I wasn’t reading doc written in a parallel universe. For made up pronouns, they require searching on the web which is super annoying too.

So yes, I refuse to play the attention game of a few people that are decided to ruin fluid reading for anyone else for their own self-important interests. They are doing the same in my native language on a larger scale and my opposition is consequently stronger there. Language is a shared good and is the basis of human communication, so it must not weaponized by an infime minority to create division among people.

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