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Comment by shawkinaw | Hacker News Reader

Can we agree to use the plural "their" for ambiguous sex third-person possessive? "His" is sexist, but so is "her", which is distracting on top of that because it isn't conventional.

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As someone that's not a native english speaker, can I ask you why "his" is sexist?

A quick read of a dictionary (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/his) says that his is "the possessive form of he", and the second definition of "he" is "anyone (without reference to sex)". That's also what I got taught in middle/high school.

Sorry if I'm just missing something and this is a stupid question.

Something is sexist when language users think it is. The problem with he/him/his is that the primary meaning refers to males, only. Because of that, anyone reading it gets pushed towards the primary meaning.

That's why some people push towards the use of the singular they (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they) That may eventually change the language for all.

Because it leads to a default assumption of a male actor which has often been relied upon to exclude women, especially from career roles. While a writer or speaker may intend a term generically, readers and listeners often infer (or pretend to infer) the gendered meaning.

For example, consider the following headline 'What you can tell about a doctor from the sort of shoes he wears.' You're probably not picturing any women's shoes when you read that.

IIRC studies show the 'generic' he isn't so generic; speakers will picture a man.

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The real sexism is inferring that "her"'s do not normally possess.

It can be argued that "right" as in "right side" has good connotations, because it is also the word for correct. In Germanic languages, it is the same word as the word for "higher", which arguably also has positive connotations. Then it can be argued that "right handed" has culturally, and through these languages, been given a higher status than being left handed.

If I could flip a switch, I would make it so that "their" or something similar was a gender-neutral pronoun, so that we can avoid both sounding sexist and sounding awkward. On the other hand, languages probably have a lot of cultural baggage associated with it that are outdated. But these are artifacts of the history of the languages intertwined with the past cultures that used it; we don't tacitly embrace the old connotations that they had simply by using it in this day and age.

The word "left" is also associated with being bad: 'sinister' comes from "sinistra", Latin for left. 'Gauche', or clumsy, is the french word for left. And 'dextrous', another good thing, is from the Latin for right. And this isn't accidental, but because being left-handed used to be considered a sign of evil. Some nice etymology lists here: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/39092/how-did-sin...

Interestingly, the article makes clear that it's easier to predict "her" age than "his" age given their name.

We originally changed it to "their", but quickly reverted it because "her" is relevant to the content here. Would that we could as easily "revert" this dreadful subthread—but we'll content ourselves with marking it off-topic.

Singular "they" is perfectly good, perfectly historic English (there have been countless HN threads on this, with copious citations) and it's only a matter of time till the convention goes back to being generally accepted and eliminates the pronoun gender problem [1]. In the meantime, let's restrain ourselves from having flamewars about it.

1. Which we only have because of meddling 18th and 19th-century prescriptivist grammarians in the first place. Thanks, meddling prescriptivist grammarians!

Can you explain your footnote a bit more? Pronouns are a closed class, so I have a hard time believing some prescriptivists could have changed the way normal people use pronouns.

This turns out to be a little harder to dig up from HN Search than I thought, so I've made a list of some of my favorite links on the topic. If you find any other high-quality ones, please let me know—there are several I couldn't easily find again in five minutes. I know Language Log has had many good posts about it.

There are many memorable details in this history, such as that the first English grammarian to prescribe generic 'he' was a successful female entrepreneur (who ironically was mostly an anti-prescriptivist), and that the name of another was the delightfully apropos Sir Charles Coote.

http://www.siu-voss.net/Androcentrism_in_prescriptive_gramma...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/magazine/26FOB-onlanguage-...

http://www.damninteresting.com/when-they-became-him/

http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/singular-th...

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002748.h...

http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/sgtheirl.html

http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austhlis.html

That is commonplace for non-gendered terms, but in this case the article relates more particularly to women.

I don't think "his" and "her" are sexist per se, though men tend to use the former and women the latter when referring to a theoretical or nongendered person or whatever. "His or her" everyone seems to agree is bulky, and fringe-use alternatives like "zyr" or something don't have nearly the mindspace to suggest as a reasonable alternative.

>though men tend to use the former and women the latter when referring to a theoretical or nongendered person or whatever //

Any evidence to support that assertion? If one isn't comfortable using the neutral pronouns - identical as they are with the masculine pronouns in English - the tendency is to use [singular] "they" or "his or her" IME (anecdotal as that is). I don't find women generally choose to use feminine pronouns more unless they're trying to make a point in doing so.

Example: suppose there is a sentence "Each Cub Scout must build and light a fire in order to gain his backwoodsman badge". People, myself included, will tend towards saying "gain their backwoodsman badge" rather than choosing to say "his backwoodsman badge" or "her backwoodsman badge" according to the speakers sex. Of course some people will also get upset about the gender neutrality of words that end "man".

'Singular they' is common in the UK and quite a few commonwealth countries, as well as in Ireland. While it occasionally gives rise to ambiuity, I certainly find it less confusing than randomly-selected gendered pronouns, which suggests a specificity that is often not present.

On this article, the hedline led me to think that there was something distinctive about the distribution of female names that made it far easier to guess (not tell) someone's age if they were female rather than male.

A better headline that more accurately reflected the actual content, avoided unnecessary gender classification and grammatical ambiguities would have been 'How to guess Americans' ages from their names.'

Using ‘her’ instead of ‘his’ is hardly sexist. That’s completely absurd. If it’s used consciously to make a statement there is no issue, at least not for another few centuries or so.

I merely meant that the sentence should agree with itself. If you want to talk about a woman, write "How to Tell A Woman’s Age When All You Know Is Her Name".

Not sure why you're being downvoted. I'm pretty particular about grammatical correctness but I've come around to thinking that singular "their" is a reasonable approach. I wouldn't necessarily call "his" sexist but, especially when used in the context of certain occupations for example, it does perpetuate a stereotype. And interspersing random "hers" calls attention to itself and is distracting.

There's also precedent with thou and you although that evolution was a bit more complicated and isn't quite the same thing.

Read the article.

It specifically mentions that girls names are generally more constrained in time, so the technique they use works better on women.

That seems like a tenuous argument at best. What I got from the article was that it examined both genders, and that women tended to fall into line with this method slightly more. It would be a different story if it were developed as a method for gauging women's ages, and extrapolated to men - your reasoning would hold then.

Forcing the use of "her" instead of "his" is just as sexist. If we want to improve the mental model of the listener (reader) through the use of language, then we should make a conscious effort to be correct instead of argumentative, and say "his or her" or "their".

Agreed. And we need to agree to make words like "data" and "media" group nouns?

Nope, I doubt we could all agree on that.

No, I will use 'he,' because I speak and write English, not *English.

It's only distracting because you're not used to it. Solution: get used to it.

I don't think replacing one sexist thing with another is progress.

It's not sexist. Sometimes you use one pronoun, sometimes another. Or you can say "his or her", or "their", or whatever you feel like for any given situation.

Edit: it's not ambiguous. The person in the title is a hypothetical single person. Whoever wrote the headline decided that the person they made up was feminine.

I don't see anything sexist in the article? Or are all uses of gendered pronouns to be banned?

No, we certainly shouldn't ban them. But "someone" is ambiguous, so the possessive used later in the sentence should be as well.

It's only ambiguous absent other information and the second half of the sentence provides that. So now it is someone whose identity we do not know, but we do know that the someone is female.

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