Yeah - no longer assuming good intentions is a weird thing to change. I guess it makes it easier to claim bad intentions?
The person being inappropriate will always hide behind their intent because they can only argue about their own role in the exchange (e.g. they can't argue that the target person/group isn't really hurt).
When a conversation is derailed away from the damage caused to the intent, the harasser wins. What are you going to do? Establishing a default assumption takes that away. Always have good defaults :)
There is probably some sad history behind many of those individuals, but reasonable people can disagree about how to deal with the situation.
The current fashion implies that as soon as one such person enters the community, everybody has to start metaphorically walking on tip toes.
Maybe a better outcome overall would be for the person to get therapy.
Everybody has a line somewhere for what they consider "too easily offended". This is true even for the staunchest defenders of the current fashion, because even they understand implicitly that offense can be faked.
So yeah, you need good defaults, but that's really a discussion about where exactly that line should be drawn. I doubt either extreme is the right answer.
Tell them to not make these jokes here and flag their account, repeat a handful of times and kick them out if it persists despite warnings. No need to interpret intent, no ability to hide behind ignorance after several warnings.
> Always have good defaults :)
It is impossible to harass people if you just ban every new account under the assumption of guilt.
The grammatical rule is that one male flips the plural gender to male. If you do not know the sexes, the plural is male.
As a French, the construction comes naturally because we've been taught that at school since kindergarten. This always sounded a bit weird, though.
I do not approve some "grammatical inclusivity" horrors that are being invented from time to time, but some innovative-but-not-distruptive changes would be welcome.
If you follow the grammatical history of French, the neutral gender just got folded into masculine.
>but some innovative-but-not-distruptive changes would be welcome
You can't really produce grammar by decree, at best you can systematize what already exists. The only "sane" way to have explicit neutral in French would be to go back in time, reimplement declensions and possibly mangle phonology in the process. That won't happen. All forms of "inclusive writing" are from the outset destined and meant to be an elitist signal rather than an actual linguistic feature. They won't survive and they'll been seen in the future as a strange, idiosyncratic trend of the age. A bit like Renaissance orthography, where countless letters were added without meaning to simply look fancier.
This is not just grammatical history, this is the current grammar rules.
However some people are trying to force a change of the rule by making up new words and rules, such as "iels" instead of "ils/elles".
What I am missing are the concepts young people are bringing in more and more, where they have words that become unisex (potes for instance). I listen to my children and (without any scientific analysis), it sounds to me that there is less of a boy/girl cut that there was in my times (this may be regional - this is for west of Paris).
And I agree with you that only naturally appearing changes will stay, not the ones forced on us. A typical example are the surrealist ideas of the 90's to have French equivalents for everything computer. Some stayed, the majority is now part of comedies.
Some info and alternatives here https://www.goethe.de/ins/th/en/m/spr/mag/21967217.html
- apprehending markers like -*in, -_in, -In [1]
- forming a gerund from a verb describing the activity
e.g. the word "Bäcker" - engl. "baker" - could be written as "Bäcker*in" or "Backende" (from "backen", the verb), depending on the speaker. Note that the gerund form eliminates conveying info about gender, unlike an "universal" marker like *in.
[1] for plural forms, those are expanded to -*innen, -_innen and -Innen
As for the genders of nouns, my native English French speaking friends are usually in pain.
Sincere apology or not, you get to know.
I've been moderating communities for 15 years, I've seen tricks from all manner of trolls and handling trolls with an even hand is still tricky; but being genuinely inquisitive is usually the easiest way to get around it. Even when tensions are high it makes people feel heard and understand their impact.
Do you have any other examples?
You don't get to know anything. Good trolls have also been trolling for 15 years, they've seen tricks from all manner of jannies... See where I'm going with that?
Saying that, I do agree with you, staying inquisitive and positive with bad trolls typically tampers down their rage.
Assuming good intentions enable troll to engage in endless sealioning.