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It might be a preference to use it/its as gender-neutral pronouns instead of singular they/their. Kind of wonder how common that is nowadays, since traditional
by jolmg 4y ago
It might be a preference to use it/its as gender-neutral pronouns instead of singular they/their.
Kind of wonder how common that is nowadays, since traditionally I would think people could take it as an insult where they're being referred to as a thing less than human. Tone can generally disambiguate intentions, though.
- andrewflnr 4y agoI've never encountered it on purpose. Even as a deliberate insult it's more likely to cause confusion than the desired effect.
- jolmg 4y agoYes, I didn't mean as a popular insult, but you just wouldn't use it on a person, say 20 years ago, because it was used exclusively to refer to things and animals.
- andrewflnr 4y agoRight, I'm saying it still is used (approximately[0]) exclusively for things and animals. I only brought up insults as an extreme case that highlights the common case. For people you still use "they" etc[0]. [0] This kind of thing is never absolute. We can surely find counterexamples if we dig hard enough, but rarely enough that we can ignore them for discussions like this.