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Comment by parennoob | Hacker News Reader

This is ridiculous and leads to awkward constructions like 'the user might not know that they need to catch that error' when the intended use is obviously singular.

The fair solution is to grep the entire codebase for 'he', 'him', and similarly gendered pronouns, and then randomly replace 50% of them with the corresponding female pronouns. This should be done regularly if desired.

Also, stuff like "using gendered language is hostile" is absolute rubbish. It is not hostile to have a specific instance of gendered language in technical documentation -- it makes it more personal and identifiable. To be fair, this identification can be randomized between male and female.

[EDIT: downvoters, how about my choice to not want to be known as "them" and suchlike? I would like my pronoun to be in the singular form. I am not multiple people.]

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Using they or their in a singular form is a very well-established form in historical and modern usage; the gender-indeterminate form in particular is known as the 'epicene they':

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

For instance, there are sections on there using this form by Shakespeare, Austen, Thackeray and Bernard-Shaw.

I actually wonder whether this might be an American thing, along the same lines as the Webster spelling reforms - the wikipedia page says that grammatical prescriptivism over this primarily occurs in America. Personally, I would say your quoted sentence is completely standard English.

Look at the reflexive form in that article.

"Each child feeds themself."

I don't think that singular "they" never be used, just that enforcing its usage everywhere by claiming that the opposite is "hostile" (as this PR seems to lead to) will lead to awkward constructions.

You remind me of Dr. Hofstadter's excellent essay on the subject:

"Another suggestion is that the plural pronoun "they" be used in place of the inclusive "whe." This would turn the charming proverb "Whe who laughs last, laughs best" into the bizarre concoction "They who laughs last, laughs best." As if anyone in whis right mind could have thought that the original proverb applied only to the white race! No, we don't need a new pronoun to "liberate" our minds. That's the lazy white's way of solving the pseudoproblem of racism. In any case, it's ungrammatical. The pronoun "they" is a plural pronoun, and it grates on the civilized ear to hear it used to denote only one person. Such a usage, if adopted, would merely promote illiteracy and accelerate the already scandalously rapid nosedive of the average intelligence level in our society."

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html

(Worth reading through in its entirety if you have strong feelings on the subject.)

This doesn't solve the problem of offending those who get offended by such things, or feel excluded by the use of a particular pronoun. It just kicks the can down the road because there are people who don't identify as either biological gender, or both, or a third gender, so if this sort of change absolutely must be done then it's better to just switch to a genderless -- if technically inappropriate -- pronoun.

The tone of the exchange on this PR seems pretty bullying & hostile, on both sides. It's why gender "politics", along with politics in general and religion, has become a topic I absolutely will not speak about with people.

I find it sounds more artificial to switch between male and female forms in your documentation than to use the plural forms.

Plus, the plural form actually includes people who don't identify as male or female, and an increasing number of my friends appreciates that.

Honest question, what do they prefer to be known as?

For example, if there is a person called "pat" who prefers to identify as neither male nor female, do they prefer to be called "them" in the third person? Or do they prefer something like "hir" or "zee"? (which are alternate forms as far as I have heard).

I think that if this is a hard problem, it should be solved immediately, without resorting to arbitrary made-up conventions, like using "they" everywhere.

All language is a set of "arbitrary made-up conventions".

The people I know like the 'they/them' form, since it does not sound as made-up as the other words.

I'm not a native speaker, but I agree it happens to me more often that I read past a singular they without noticing than if it were an artificial word like hir.

'they' and 'zie' are both awesome. One of those tends to garner no strange looks too.

Or, determine what the current ratio of 'he' versus 'she' is across all publicly grep'able code and adjust one's own usage so as to cause the average to skew closer to 50/50

One might not know that one needs to catch that error.

We would definitely be in favour of this construction. :)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_we]

I think you would want to avoid switching the gender of the person mid sentence.

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