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Comment by sorenjan | Hacker News Reader

Changing a quote to change "his" to "theirs" seem like a very Rust community thing to do.

> Updated to use modern pronouns.

Just for context, the quoted manifesto was originally written in French (https://monoskop.org/images/3/3b/Dada_3_Dec_1918.pdf). In that version, that particular sentence is gender neutral: "tout le monde fait son art a sa façon".

I would say that that their updated quote is a more accurate translation of the original than the English translation they initially used.

That does make it a lot better, but at the same time makes the footnote even more of a deliberate statement that could have been left out.

> That does make it a lot better

Why?

Non-native-speaker take: I don't care, it just reads a bit "weird" as I learned English before and "theirs" was plural... but I am adaptable.

As long as the meaning of the quote isn't changed I couldn't care less and it seems very important to some people.

What I personally dislike though is the whole "Ask me my pronouns" thing... like "No, I don't care about your gender or sex, as long as I am not interested in a romantic relationship with you - just tell me how to call you and I'll do it, but more effort? No!"

To elaborate a bit more: I find the topic exhausting not because I hate freedom of choosing your own gender or anything like that, but because I personally do not care about your gender at all.

I don't care about your religion, your skin color, your culture, your sex, your gender... I care about individual people but I don't reduce them to a certain aspect of their existence.

Now I find the whole "Ask me my pronouns" exhausting and also rude because it puts pressure on me to ask you about a topic I am not interested in. Like: I get it, there is social pressure, I understand that you're not happy with certain social "norms" and developments. I totally get that and I guess we are on the same side for many of them, but I still do not care about your gender until I care about your gender. (And also, I don't live in your country probably, so your local politics may be of interest, but I still don't like being forced to talk about them before I can ask a genuine question on e.g. a technology topic ;))

Just write his/her/theirs... and I will respect your choice. I will not think less of you, nor will I put you on a pedestal for something I do not care about.

The "singular they" has been a thing in English for a long time (since the 14th century according to Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they). I'm a non-native speaker as well, and wasn't taught about it in school either (maybe that has changed in the meantime?). The first time I consciously noticed it is probably in the Sting song If You Love Somebody Set Them Free (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_You_Love_Somebody_Set_Them_...), which was his debut solo single, so is already quite old itself (1985, although I probably heard it later).

Yeah, it's been commonly used when the object (in the grammatical sense) would typically have a gender but it is unspecified. In fact, it's so common native English speakers don't even notice they're doing it. (Which produces a steady stream of unintentional humor from those pretending it isn't a thing.) The usage as a sign of respect for specific non-binary and other gender non-confirming people is more modern (2009 is apparently the first recorded example). Although to a great extent, it doesn't matter. Language evolves over time and dictionary definitions necessarily trail usage.

The wikipedia article is quite detailed and will probably supply more information that anyone particularly wanted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

There is also "singular you" in English.

> Non-native-speaker take: I don't care, it just reads a bit "weird" as I learned English before and "theirs" was plural...

Non-native speaker too, I find it easier to adjust in English compared to my native language (French), probably because the language is less engrained in me. I embraced the English neutral pleural - it's even convenient - but I found myself a bit more annoyed with the so called French *écriture inclusive", such as "les étudiant.e.s sont fatigué.e.s". Not really pretty IMHO. We could find something better..

> I learned English before and "theirs" was plural..

Its been done before. See royal plural

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

Pluralis Majestatis exists in my mothertongue too ;)

People who want others to ask them their pronouns before referring to them, what is your reason for doing so?

As an avid fan of Rust, the Rust community is incredibly cringe about this topic.

Seems more cringe to complain about pronouns

I think we’re all saying the same things here. No one wants to hear complaints about pronouns

Actually, what I don't want is a discussion about pronouns being at the top of the comments. Aren't there more interesting topics to discuss about this project?!

Indeed, far more annoying is that someone grousing about the TFA update about pronouns "seems like a very [subsection of] HN community thing to do."

And yet here I am, N levels down in this thread, griping about it. Oops.

Changing it is perfectly reasonable, but specifically advertising that you've done it in a footnote is extremely Rust community.

The policing of what other people should or shouldn't care about or advertise they care about is very boorish to me, but of course here I am doing the same thing.

On iPad, I see a back-link from the footnote, but no forward link to it from the corrupted quotation.

Is it still a quote in that case?

I've understood that you can modify quotes but you have to indicate the bits that you've modified. So "It enforces memory safety" becomes "[Rust] enforces memory safety" if you want to modify a quote to make more sense out of context.

Yes, it's just a different translation of the original French quote.

> modern pronouns.

In my native language it is quite old-school. Really polite form.

Singular they and their is six centuries old in English.

It is also a very Dadaism thing to do. Da!

I mean, Tristan Tzara is Romanian and so it seems likely that this thought isn't originally English anyway, so it's reasonable for a modern writer to choose to translate it in a more inclusive way. I expect that an early English Bible and a modern one likewise make different choices about whether a text that's clearly about people generally and isn't concerned with sex or gender - should say "He" or "They" / "His" or "Their" and so on.

I also noticed this, along with the warnings that Dada doesn't really exist yet (which is fine, thanks for the heads up).

I predict this project will have its priorities backwards. There's a group of people who want to govern a programming language project, and inject their ideology into that structure, and maybe there's another group of avid language designers in there too. I think there are more of the first.

How do you “inject ideology” in a programming language?

Compiler error if the variable name is sexist?

> How do you “inject ideology” in a programming language?

I was just talking about the project community and governance. It would be hard to imagine injecting ideology into the language itself.

Oh wait, nevermind...

https://doc.rust-lang.org/beta/nightly-rustc/tidy/style/cons...

This is part of rustc’s test suite. It affects nobody but rustc.

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy

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