4 ms·

>"and leave himself/herself" Would it be proper to replace this "himself/herself" with simple self? And what do we call gender neutral person if not?

• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• 83457 5y ago
  themself
• ngomez 5y ago
  Whether it's proper depends on who you ask but you can use the singular they. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
  • FpUser 5y ago
    This is interesting.
• unmole 5y ago
  Themself sounds more natural to me than simple self. Singular they has been in common use since the 14th century. Don't let prescriptivists tell you otherwise.
  • klyrs 5y ago
    Theirself sounds way better, but I've always been more of a neologist.
  • dfback 5y ago
    A: They are after you! B: Who, a single they or multiple theys? Atributed to Dave Chappelle.
• IncRnd 5y ago
  Depending on the sentence you are looking for the reflexive pronoun "oneself" or "one's self" to refer to an unspecified person's self consciousness.
• dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Would it be proper to replace this "himself/herself" with simple self? No. > And what do we call gender neutral person if not? they/them/their has been extremely common for gender-neutral abstract use for centuries. It spent a while with strong bias against it in formal contexts but that's weakening recently. One/one/one’s is less controversial in formal settings, but requires a somewhat different writing style. “Botvinnik famously recommended that a professional chess player should only play 80 tournament games a year and leave himself/herself time to think about chess.” might become: “Botvinnik famously recommended that, as a professional chess player, one should only play 80 tournament games a year and leave oneself time to think about chess.” or, another option, is do it without any pronouns at all: “Botvinnik famously recommended a professional chess player only playing 80 tournament games a year and leaving time to think about chess.”
  • peter422 5y ago
    And yet the current world chess champion often plays 80 bullet games within a matter of hours in various online events or matches. Everybody is different. Playing lots of games gives you the ability to experience playing different types of positions against different players, which can feed into your training in terms of figuring out which areas to focus on. If you want to get better at chess you will have to study, but I don’t think playing is in itself negative. Only if you never study and only play. There are also practical things like managing the clock and managing your attitude that you can only practice in games.
    • djrockstar1 5y ago
      > And yet the current world chess champion often plays 80 bullet games within a matter of hours in various online events or matches. Botvinnik's quote refers to tournament games, that is, long, over the board, classical time control games that take hours to play. It says nothing about playing practice/friendly games, or playing other time controls.
      • dmurray 5y ago
        Botvinnik also claimed he only ever played one blitz game, so he did mean this in a stronger sense. Though he may have been allowing for training games at tournament time controls. Incidentally, I'm familiar with the recommendation (actually I thought it was a maximum of 50 games in a year) but I can't find any source for it online. Does anyone have a source?
• jhgb 5y ago
  ...or you could just use, you know, plural? "Professional chess players should only play 80 tournament games a year and leave themselves time to think about chess." No problem there.