6 ms·

This is just hilarious to me because I imagine Spanish is like French where every word and pronoun, including the sky, a windshield and a machine gun is gendere

• leephillips 4y ago
  You imagine right. And, like French, the genders often do not reflect expected associations with sex. “Clitoris” in Spanish is masculine. It’s more to do with etymology. The “-dad” words such as universidad are feminine; but there’s nothing particularly female about a university.
• acdha 4y ago
  It’s a mistake to think of this as something inflicted by outsiders. Much of the early usage around the turn of the century was by native speakers, but those were activists pushing boundaries – basically challenging continuation of an arbitrary convention. That’s a reasonable thing to do but that doesn’t say what’ll become mainstream. It has seemed like in this case the problem was that some people outside of those communities heard that debate and thought they were being accommodating by going with the loudest voices on the topic rather the most representative. In a more HN analogy, it feels like setting a corporate standard on Arch Linux without realizing that you’re hearing from a small, self-selected group because most people don’t feel strongly enough to spend time evangelizing.