5 ms·

I'm offended you assumed the commenter is male.

• ultimatedelman 12y ago
  I'm offended it was assumed the commenter was human.
• sliverstorm 12y ago
  Take it up with English, and maybe while you're at it you can invent a gender-neutral pronoun better than "zhe" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_pronoun#Invented_pronouns http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_pronoun#Invented...
  • eru 12y ago
    They?
    • sliverstorm 12y ago
      At least in modern usage, "They" is flawed. For starters its plurality is ambiguous.
      • dragonwriter 12y ago
        > At least in modern usage, "They" is flawed. For starters its plurality is ambiguous. In the cases where it is used in a gender-neutral but expressly singular sense, this is false. In cases where whether the number of the referent is ambiguous and might be either singular or plural, the use of the plural they has been acceptable longer, and has never been objected to even by the prescriptives who have tried (and are still trying, though their influence has waned somewhat from its late 19th Century height) to force generic he in place of singular they as part of their effort to impose Latin-inspired grammar rules on English.
        • sliverstorm 12y ago
          dragonwriter had some interesting things to say. However, they used a lot of hand-wavy claims. That sounds normal to you?
          • dragonwriter 12y ago
            The only structural problem (and its a minor one, since the resulting ambiguity is readily resolvable from context) I see with that is that there are two different possible referents for "they" in the preceding sentence; in this particular case the fact that there are both singular and plural uses of "they" is relevant to why both referents are possible, but you can run into the same ambiguity with gender and number specific pronouns. Of course, there's no real good reason to use a pronoun there except for an excessive fondness for choppy sentences.
      • eru 12y ago
        That's why we should use `thou' again and don't rely on `you'.
  • vacri 12y ago
    We have one, it's "they", and it's been in use for centuries. It's just not something we're quite used to with modern usage, but it's fine (we don't shirk from adding plenty of other words), and its far better than 'zhe' - for a start, people already know how to pronounce 'they'. Your own link reports it in usage since the 15th C.
• martiuk 12y ago
  I'm sure xie wouldn't mind.