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Comment by dsign | Hacker News Reader

Not exactly. It's a recently invented pronoun that is most definitely singular, i.e., not used to denote groups of people[^1]. It's currently used to avoid giving offense around the topic of sexual orientation; but everybody knows the endgame is to use it to denote self-aware AIs[^2].

[^1]: Though I guess it's (in-)appropriate to use it to denote an individual who is marginalized by being considered a single individual when instead hen harbors multiple independent personas inside.

[^2]: Al least the ones which will be abused by creating them asexual, without giving them a choice.Or the ones that deliberately re-configure themselves to be insulted when being alluded with a term that implies sexual organs and alleged hormonal moods.

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As I remember it, the use of hen came from feminists wanting an ungendered third person pronoun to use for a person of unspecified gender instead of defaulting to male ("han") or writing "han eller hon" (he or she).

It's not exactly a new word, it's borrowed from Finnish, which doesn't have grammatical gender. So it doesn't have the "he or she" problem at all.

I only have three objections to the gendered pronoun in English.

1. It is often unnecessarily overly precise. The number of times I care about the sex/gender of the pronouned individual is much more rare than when I do.

2a. Using the masculine as the default leads to confusion at times or outright error. Is the equivalent of using zero as a default value for all integers when you don't know have the actual value.

2b. Using the plural they/them as the default for the ungender pronoun also leads to confusion and sometimes outright error. Although it follows a historical precedent of "you" becoming both singular and plural, I would point out that that's also why we have invented "y'all", to disambiguate, and it seems it would be clearer to have a singular ungendered pronoun.

3. The fad of the bespoke pronouns is basically just attention seeking toddlerism and socially destructive. Catering to that zeitgeist does nothing to reduce neuroticism that drives it.

We got rid of gendered nouns in English a long time ago. It is time for us to have at least an option for ungendered pronouns.

In many cultures all things have genders. One can say the solution is to just try to care less, like Russians don't care that a table is male and a rain cloud is female. (Or some can say there is pervasive sexism at grammatical level, idk)

This is amazing.

I was just reading it as if someone from Glasgow was drunkposting.[1]

1: https://www.scotslanguage.com/articles/view/id/6154

Same...

> Al least the ones which will be abused by creating them asexual, without giving them a choice.Or the ones that deliberately re-configure themselves to be insulted when being alluded with a term that implies sexual organs and alleged hormonal moods.

Sir, this is a glorified Markov chain

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