Hacker News Reader

Comment by ufocia | Hacker News Reader

Not an ad hominem attack or a microaggression, but hopefully constructive criticism. Your use of the "them" pronoun makes the post confusing. Does it refer to "they," presumably the doctors, the employer (job), the insurance, UT Southwestern, or to the gendered "boyfriend." Since you already decided to use a gendered noun, perhaps use it instead of the "they/them" or use a matching gendered pronoun "he/him" to distinguish the particular person from the other "them."

I'm glad that your boyfriend has a wonderful and caring person like you to lean on.

View on HN

It's not the most common, but some people do go by they/them and still use certain gendered terms like boyfriend/girlfriend where appropriate. (Full disclosure that I'm one of them, lol.)

I think part of it is that there isn't a great neutral word to take its place. "Partner" is probably the best option overall, but it can mean anything from "person I've been married to for 15 years" to "person with whom I opened an LLC," whereas boy/girlfriend is pretty specific. And the only neutral term of that specificity I've seen proposed is "joyfriend," which I find unbearably silly because I'm not 15 years old :P

It would make it more clear, but in this case each Use of They was used right after the subject was mentioned. it stole only be confusing if They was used after multiple subjects are mentioned at once. But all pronouns can suffer from this.

Oddly, the writer used "he" in "they determined he had Stage 2 bladder cancer" because they had already used the plural "they" in the same clause – showing that they know how confusing the singular "they" can be. Sometimes ツ

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

People know what the singular "they" is. It has been a common feature of English for centuries.

It's just difficult to parse a writing where the same pronoun is used throughout for multiple different entities. This exact same issue commonly crops up with "he", "she", and "it" as well.

The solution in these instances is to limit usage of the pronoun altogether and just use the noun directly wherever there may be any ambiguity.

For example, don't say, "Julia wrecked Sarah's car; she was pissed!" The "she" here should just be replaced with "Sarah" or "Julia", even if it sounds a little odd to use the same noun twice in short succession.

This is a good example of where they is extra confusing too. It would be better if English had separate singular/plural versions of they.

If Sarah goes by ‘they’, “They was pissed” sounds wrong and most people would actually speak “they were pissed”… but now it is a three way ambiguity: Julia pissed, Sarah pissed, both pissed.

This feels like an example of a bigger failure mode, but I can’t nail it down. Something like ‘groups are resistant to short term change even if it is a clear Pareto improvement’

Ya. I preferred the sci-fi narratives with zir, zim, etc. But nobody asked for my opinion.

The history of pronouns for female, male, neuter, and none-of-above tracks with cultural notions. English's pronouns will mosdef evolve to accommodate the new norms. We're merely in a transitional phase.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com