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> But imagine I told that riddle where the solution is "the surgeon is the boy's mother". But I kept referring to the surgeon by the "gender neutral" pronoun "h
by jfk13 8y ago
> But imagine I told that riddle where the solution is "the surgeon is the boy's mother". But I kept referring to the surgeon by the "gender neutral" pronoun "he".
In that case you would indeed be deliberately misleading your hearer. Given that you know the gender of the surgeon, and indeed this information is key to your riddle, you would be expected to use a specifically matching pronoun (if any - in practice, of course, the riddle is carefully phrased so as to avoid using a pronoun for the surgeon).
That's not comparable to referring to an unknown person of unspecified gender, where the long-established English convention is to use "he" as a non-gender-specific singular pronoun.
- SilasX 8y agoIf "he" really, unambiguously functions as a gender neutral pronouns for persons of unspecified identity, that shouldn't matter, though.
- SilasX 8y agoLet me say it a different way then. You can't both say that "he" is a gender neutral pronoun for a generic person, and that I'm affirming a specific gender for said person with "he". Those are directly contradictory.
- jfk13 8y ago"He" - like many words - has multiple meanings and usages. Context matters. In some contexts, it is an unambiguously male pronoun. In others, it's not. It doesn't work to pick just one specific definition, and then interpret the word according to that definition in every context. Human language is rarely that rigid.
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