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Comment by binaryorganic | Hacker News Reader

*their bosses.

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

This strikes me as one of those linguistic squabbles - along with changing the definition of literally to include figuratively - where we just need to accept that language evolves, and usages that may be historically correct aren’t necessarily justifiable in a modern context.

I also only use literally literally. I refuse to tell my daughter that "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind" effectively equates to "this one is for the bros!" or that "all men are created equal" doesn't apply to her. You've got 1400 years of English language momentum to overcome if you want to change the meanings of established words.

> I refuse to tell my daughter that "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind" effectively equates to "this one is for the bros!" or that "all men are created equal" doesn't apply to her.

No reasonable person is suggesting that we need to eschew historical context and nuance to redefine statements like these. At the same time, we should acknowledge that language isn’t immutable - as 1400 years of English language momentum can attest - and there’s nothing inherently wrong about its generational evolution.

> and there’s nothing inherently wrong about its generational evolution

If you make literally mean figuratively as well, it loses all meaning. In what context is that word ever useful? It describes literally everything. Making the language less expressive and more difficult to use is wrong.

In the same sense, is the idea that I now have to look when a particular piece was written to understand how to interpret the pronouns? How does that make the language better?

I'm all for improving the language. Slang, new words, new idioms, have at it. I just don't see how either of these changes improve the language.

> In the same sense, is the idea that I now have to look when a particular piece was written to understand how to interpret the pronouns? How does that make the language better?

We already interpret language through the lens of its era all the time.

For example, when's the last time you heard someone use the word "gay" to mean "happy" or "awful" to mean "awe-inspiring?" They have very different colloquial definitions today, but when I hear the Flintstones theme song I know what "have a gay old time" means, and when I go to church I know that the hymn "God of awful majesty" isn't sacrilegious.

Including the definition of literally to include figuratively reflects how it is used by many, and dictionaries should do that. But it's possible (and my hope is) that it eventually goes out of fashion as a filler word for twitter-facing teens trying to sound smart, and effectively goes back to meaning what it meant before, since its literal meaning is very useful and specific, and will stay relevant beyond historical use. The new "meaning" is really to be meaningless, which is not what I'd consider an advantageous mutation in the evolution analogy.

Thank you. I noticed this a lot on HN, but I don't know how to react. There is a common presumption that co-workers and managers will be men. It bothers me. I work in Asia where there are lots of talented women engineers. Each time I read one of those sentences, I do a double take!

I'm pretty sure most people over ~30 in the US were taught that was the correct form. Common usage has changed only very recently. At any rate, as long as using the feminine is fine, so's using the masculine. Some writers even use both, switching between them. Me, I much prefer the singular-they, because I don't think keeping masculine the standard is tenable or desirable, and I find writing that uses the feminine harder to read (because there's a vast body of existing writing that defaults to masculine and it's by far the bulk of all material I've read in my life, so if I see a feminine pronoun it throws me off for a second as my brain reflexively starts to try to figure out who exactly we're talking about—this is getting better as the practice is wider-spread, but c'mon, let's just use the singular-they) and because it doesn't tend to generate discussion about pronoun choice.

[EDIT] fixed a mis-labeling.

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