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Comment by melissalobos | Hacker News Reader

> Sounds very drama free for them (the singular them.. not the plural... sigh).

I don't quite understand this line, would you prefer they identify as multiple people? Or is the objection to using the singular them in general? There is a large historic precedent for using a singular them for people you for whom you are unfamiliar with their gender. Not even trying to be "woke" but if there was someone named Terry(about equal likelihood of being male or female), it makes a lot of sense to use "them"/"they" instead of "he" or "she".

Edit: did you mean that for the other members it wasn't drama free?

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I think they just meant that in this context them is ambiguous, meaning they are forced to clarify in this case. A regression in API. One that would be nice to see fixed in the next release.

If you're troubled by the ambiguity of singular "they", I would like to invite you to share in the use of my boutique third person plural neopronoun, "th'all" (objective "all'em"; possessive determiner "all th'all's").

It's the perfect neologism for these factionalist and accusatory times, indexing no one's gender other than your own, insofar as it identifies yourself as someone who has a use for it.

As for the Rust team, th'all have contributed mightily to the advancement of the industry and to the open source community in particular. I wish all'em the best of luck in all th'all's future endeavors.

> third person plural neopronoun, "th'all"

What we need is an unambiguous set of third person singular pronouns. "They" and "them" is already a fine set of gender indifferent plurals. It's "he", "she", "it", "his", "hers", "its" that we're having problems with.

Ok, I just read your last sentence out loud, and I reckon I sounded like a cross between Colonel Sanders and Yosemite Sam. Thanks for the laughs!

I feel like the current release of English can handle this fine. "It was very drama-free for Florian: <reddit link>" If you don't know someone's name, it could have been "it was very drama-free for at least one individual: <reddit link>".

Online I use "they" or *them" quite often when talking about people whose username doesn't reveal their gender (and quite frankly this is the default).

So I am not sure why people have negative feelings about people unwilling to communicate themselves as member of one gender for one reason or another. If someone feels that way, they very likely have a metric ton of friction with their surroundings anyways — which is in itself certainly quite unenjoyable and certainly not something people tend to desire without a huge internal urge. Calling them "them" doesn't cost a lot (especially considering that we do this with strangers on the internet already) — why not just do it?

I know people that have the general assumption that people want to be called by another pronoun for neferious reasons like a implied urge to "get attention". But I think this is not only a oversimplification, but also a statement that rarely describes the reality of the person they talk about if you do the research a d actually get to know them and their reasoning.

> which is in itself certainly quite unenjoyable and certainly not something people tend to desire without a huge internal urge. Calling them "them" doesn't cost a lot (especially considering that we do this with strangers on the internet already) — why not just do it?

I don't think anyone here, including myself, is objecting to that. I'm objecting to the generic identifier being both plural and singular and can lead to confusion in contexts, as in this case.

I really don't care about the whole identification debate. It's no different to a name to me. However as is often the case i don't know what they prefer, and i don't care to look it up, i'm just trying to be generic.

I just thought: maybe I don't care because my first language is German and there "sie" means "they" while the formal version of "you" is "Sie".

So if you ask a stranger in German you basically end up saying the english equivalent of "could they tell me what time it is?" for a english variant of "could you tell me what time it is?"

To make things worse "sie" is not only singular and plural depending on the context, it also is the equivalent of the female pronoun "her".

I kindly ask that we please leave this passive aggressive culture war stuff off HN

Seems to me mutual respect and such niceties of civil society as being kind, respecting pronoun preferences, avoiding derogatory language, etc. are essential to making HN a worthwhile place to be.

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