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Damn English and its lack of gender non-specific pronouns! Seriously, though... what is the implication that I am missing? What is the point of bringing up the

Damn English and its lack of gender non-specific pronouns! Seriously, though... what is the implication that I am missing? What is the point of bringing up the CEO's pay? Should it be government mandated, is that what you all believe?

dandelany 11y ago
Singular "they" is gender-neutral and grammatically correct, I don't know why more people don't use it.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- vacri 11y ago
  I don't know why people dismiss it "because it sounds a little funny to me", but are okay with abominations like "he/she" or "zhe"...
  - licoricetic 11y ago
    maybe those are different people
    - vacri 11y ago
      A venn diagram will provide all possible combinations of opinions, but there are definitely people out there who suggest 'he/she' or 'zhe' instead of 'they' because the latter 'sounds funny'
      - douche 11y ago
        Zhe has got to be the stupidest proposal I've heard of. Let's invent a word using a letter that almost never leads non-loanword English words to solve a problem that only pedants and people who are eager to find sexist oppression in the innocuous are bothered by.
  - pyre 11y ago
    I'm of the opinion that "they" shouldn't be both singular and plural, but zhe/zer/whatever are just too "alien" sounding to work (besides the fact that they are just too close to he or her, and guaranteed to cause confusion if someone hears the word wrong).
- patrickaljord 11y ago
  People probably don't use it because at every English school in non English-speaking countries, they teach you that "they" is for plural only. I had personally never heard until recently that "they" could be singular too. It also really sounds weird to a French like me.
  - ams6110 11y ago
    They also taught that "they" is plural in American schools up until the last decade or so. I remember getting points off of papers for misusing "they" in a singular context. So it sounds weird to me too. We were always taught that "he" is a gender-neutral singular as needed.
    - dpark 11y ago
      When were you taught to use "he" as a gender neutral pronoun on English? I've never heard anyone in an educational position advocate that. I was taught to use the horribly awkward "he or she" (his or hers, etc) or alternatively to restructure to actually refer to plural. e.g. Instead of "A software engineer should test his code" use "Software engineers should test their code". I'm glad the "neutral they" is catching on.
  - pyre 11y ago
    I grew up in the US, and I still think that singular "they" is weird. I remember thinking that it was weird in grade school, and wishing that there was a better gender-neutral pronoun. Part of the problem with it being used in singular and plural context is that it's possible to use it in an ambiguous way where the ambiguity comes from the lack of enough context to differentiate between plural or singular. Separate words would remove this.
    - dang 11y ago
      It's weird in theory but not in practice. Listen closely and you'll find that every every English speaker uses it without thinking.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
  "They" is just as singular as "you" was way back when.
dave_sullivan 11y ago
That pay and performance ought to be correlated? Double standard and all.
- reddytowns 11y ago
  If you hire a worker for minimum wage to stock shelves, and they do a shitty job of it, do you blame the worker? Or is it your fault for making a poor hiring decision? The same question applies with a CEO, which the shareholders, presumably, voted in. They could have put in someone else, maybe someone who, gasp, charges more, to run a $100 billion company. I don't understand this attitude, as if "the powers that be"/"the Man"/"the 1%" put the CEO there and therefore it's all their fault that you don't make as much as them.
  - pyre 11y ago
    I think some of the resentment comes from "Golden Parachutes" too. While it's stupid for the Board to allow a contract where the CEO get $X million even if they run the company into the ground, the CEO that runs the company into the ground bears some responsibility too.
    - reddytowns 11y ago
      Why don't you become a consultant, then, and tell companies to hire the cheapest CEO they can get, and see how that works out for them? Aiee! Jesus, downvoters, dissent from the party line isn't tolerated, is it?
      - dang 11y ago
        > Jesus, downvoters, dissent from the party line isn't tolerated, is it? These downvotes have nothing to do with a "party line" but with your comments being unsubstantive. Comments on HN need to be both civil and substantive. Also, it breaks the rules to go on about downvotes in HN comments. You've done this often in previous threads too; please don't. We have not one but two guidelines about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
jldugger 11y ago
You haven't been following IBM then. 2010-2015 was "Roadmap 2015" during which the principal goal of the CEO was to bring earnings per share up to $20. It's 2016, and the EPS is still only $10. In the process, they've issued countless share buyback programs, fired anything that looked like it might be earning less than the average required, and sold the rest at firesale prices. For example, they paid GlobalFoundries 1.5 billion to take their POWER chip fabs and run them. IBM's notable for their government services, and they lost a cloud computing contract with the CIA to Amazon, and filed suit, only to be found against publicly as 'not actually a cloud computing service.' So they bought Softlayer, which incidentally, doesn't have the profit margins they would have needed for ye olde Roadmap. Bloomberg Businessweek went so far as to describe the executive strategy in 2014 as "financial engineering." Given the complete failure to achieve not only value for shareholders, but their own fucking stated goals, it seems reasonable to question exactly what the executive team is paid and why.
- reddytowns 11y ago
  I think the question should be whether a different executive team should be in place, and this should be asked by the shareholders. Whether the CEO is paid $1.6 million, $100K, or $16 million, it doesn't really effect IBM's bottom line much.
Nutmog 11y ago
"He" used to be gender neutral [1]. If readers stop worrying about gender so much then it would still work. We tolerate it in old writing like the bible and little quotes of the form "He who ... shall ..." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neutral_pronouns#Generic_he https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neu...

dandelany 11y ago

Singular "they" is gender-neutral and grammatically correct, I don't know why more people don't use it.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
vacri 11y ago
I don't know why people dismiss it "because it sounds a little funny to me", but are okay with abominations like "he/she" or "zhe"...
- licoricetic 11y ago
  maybe those are different people
  - vacri 11y ago
    A venn diagram will provide all possible combinations of opinions, but there are definitely people out there who suggest 'he/she' or 'zhe' instead of 'they' because the latter 'sounds funny'
    - douche 11y ago
      Zhe has got to be the stupidest proposal I've heard of. Let's invent a word using a letter that almost never leads non-loanword English words to solve a problem that only pedants and people who are eager to find sexist oppression in the innocuous are bothered by.
- pyre 11y ago
  I'm of the opinion that "they" shouldn't be both singular and plural, but zhe/zer/whatever are just too "alien" sounding to work (besides the fact that they are just too close to he or her, and guaranteed to cause confusion if someone hears the word wrong).
patrickaljord 11y ago
People probably don't use it because at every English school in non English-speaking countries, they teach you that "they" is for plural only. I had personally never heard until recently that "they" could be singular too. It also really sounds weird to a French like me.
- ams6110 11y ago
  They also taught that "they" is plural in American schools up until the last decade or so. I remember getting points off of papers for misusing "they" in a singular context. So it sounds weird to me too. We were always taught that "he" is a gender-neutral singular as needed.
  - dpark 11y ago
    When were you taught to use "he" as a gender neutral pronoun on English? I've never heard anyone in an educational position advocate that. I was taught to use the horribly awkward "he or she" (his or hers, etc) or alternatively to restructure to actually refer to plural. e.g. Instead of "A software engineer should test his code" use "Software engineers should test their code". I'm glad the "neutral they" is catching on.
- pyre 11y ago
  I grew up in the US, and I still think that singular "they" is weird. I remember thinking that it was weird in grade school, and wishing that there was a better gender-neutral pronoun. Part of the problem with it being used in singular and plural context is that it's possible to use it in an ambiguous way where the ambiguity comes from the lack of enough context to differentiate between plural or singular. Separate words would remove this.
  - dang 11y ago
    It's weird in theory but not in practice. Listen closely and you'll find that every every English speaker uses it without thinking.
GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
"They" is just as singular as "you" was way back when.

dave_sullivan 11y ago

That pay and performance ought to be correlated? Double standard and all.

reddytowns 11y ago
If you hire a worker for minimum wage to stock shelves, and they do a shitty job of it, do you blame the worker? Or is it your fault for making a poor hiring decision? The same question applies with a CEO, which the shareholders, presumably, voted in. They could have put in someone else, maybe someone who, gasp, charges more, to run a $100 billion company. I don't understand this attitude, as if "the powers that be"/"the Man"/"the 1%" put the CEO there and therefore it's all their fault that you don't make as much as them.
- pyre 11y ago
  I think some of the resentment comes from "Golden Parachutes" too. While it's stupid for the Board to allow a contract where the CEO get $X million even if they run the company into the ground, the CEO that runs the company into the ground bears some responsibility too.
  - reddytowns 11y ago
    Why don't you become a consultant, then, and tell companies to hire the cheapest CEO they can get, and see how that works out for them? Aiee! Jesus, downvoters, dissent from the party line isn't tolerated, is it?
    - dang 11y ago
      > Jesus, downvoters, dissent from the party line isn't tolerated, is it? These downvotes have nothing to do with a "party line" but with your comments being unsubstantive. Comments on HN need to be both civil and substantive. Also, it breaks the rules to go on about downvotes in HN comments. You've done this often in previous threads too; please don't. We have not one but two guidelines about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

jldugger 11y ago

You haven't been following IBM then. 2010-2015 was "Roadmap 2015" during which the principal goal of the CEO was to bring earnings per share up to $20. It's 2016, and the EPS is still only $10. In the process, they've issued countless share buyback programs, fired anything that looked like it might be earning less than the average required, and sold the rest at firesale prices. For example, they paid GlobalFoundries 1.5 billion to take their POWER chip fabs and run them. IBM's notable for their government services, and they lost a cloud computing contract with the CIA to Amazon, and filed suit, only to be found against publicly as 'not actually a cloud computing service.' So they bought Softlayer, which incidentally, doesn't have the profit margins they would have needed for ye olde Roadmap. Bloomberg Businessweek went so far as to describe the executive strategy in 2014 as "financial engineering." Given the complete failure to achieve not only value for shareholders, but their own fucking stated goals, it seems reasonable to question exactly what the executive team is paid and why.

reddytowns 11y ago
I think the question should be whether a different executive team should be in place, and this should be asked by the shareholders. Whether the CEO is paid $1.6 million, $100K, or $16 million, it doesn't really effect IBM's bottom line much.

Nutmog 11y ago

"He" used to be gender neutral [1]. If readers stop worrying about gender so much then it would still work. We tolerate it in old writing like the bible and little quotes of the form "He who ... shall ..." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neutral_pronouns#Generic_he https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neu...