To summarize briefly up-front, I also concur that singular they is the best solution to the gendered pronoun problem available to us right now and agree with the patch provided.
Charles Plessy <ple...@debian.org> writes: > Anyway, my point was that the URLs pointed by Steve and Cyril clearly > indicate that the use of "they" instead of "he" is not uniform. In the > spirit of our efforts for software standardization, I would like to > propose that the Developers Reference references which style it follows, > first to acknowledge that there is more than one way to do it, and > second to indicate that what way to consistently follow within this > document. This is a good suggestion if we can find an on-line style guide that we're happy with. Personally, I tend to defer to the Chicago Manual of Style except in places where I have reason to disagree with it, since it's considered one of the most canonical style guides for US English, but it has the significant drawbacks of being (a) non-free ($65), and (b) huge. > More in the detail, I am not particularly convinced by URLs given by > Steve and Cyril. First, Wikipedia is often either over-emphasizing > controversial points of view in the goal of being fair, or in contrary > overly biased in articles that are made ad-hoc to support one cause > (like the neurotypes). In general, I agree with your concern about Wikipedia. On this particular topic (singular "they"), the Wikipedia article is quite good. This is one of those topics that's been hashed out quite a bit in grammar fora and in academic writing, and while it's not yet entirely uncontroversial, I think it's safe to say that singular "they" is slowly winning the battle for the preferred gender-neutral pronoun form. > I did a bit of research on my side, and found some guidelines on the U.S > National Institutes of Health, where the use of the singular "they" is > not mentionned among the solutions to the problem. > Other ways to handle this problem are to recast a sentence in the plural, > reword to eliminate gender problems, or replace the masculine pronoun with > “one” or “you”. > > http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK993/#A243 The 15th Edition of the Chicago Manual of Style (whose text on the subject is similar enough that my guess is that it's the origin of the NIH guidelines) basically says that there's no good solution other than the very difficult recasting of the sentence to avoid pronouns. They mention both generic "he" and singular "they" and state that both of those options will provoke widespread opposition and offense among many readers. (Ah, and I see that there's some discussion of the stance of the Chicago Manual of Style in the Wikipedia article.) The 15th Edition was published in 2003. Since then, my personal impression is that opposition to generic "he" has hardened considerably and opposition to singular "they" has weakened somewhat. Using "he" as a generic pronoun for a person of indeterminate gender is now generally considered inappropriate in manuals and documentation in the free software communities I've followed and the discussions I've seen, although there is the occasional hold-out. I see there's now a 16th Edition out, but I don't personally have a copy. I'm curious whether it has changed its stance on singular "they" back to the stance in the 14th Edition. I think the most compelling argument in favor of the increasing acceptance of singular "they" presented in the Wikipedia article is the citation of the New International Version Bible, since that was apparently based on a scientific study of actual language use. > With the people to whom I talk everyday at work, the trend that I see is > that masculine words are becoming neutral, like "guys" in "you guys", > which I hear used by women adressing to women. I would not draw conclusions about "he" from usage of "guys." "You guys" is a colloquial expression with a much different history and with much different cultural connotations than "he." I agree with you that "guys" is probably becoming less gendered over time, but my impression is that, if anything, "he" is becoming *more* gendered. > To my knowledge, nobody here is using the singular they. Use of singular "they" is essentially universal among native US English speakers in day-to-day spoken language to the extent that we don't notice it because it's so familiar. Many of us had it drummed out of our writing during early education precisely *because* it was universal in common speech even when considered formally incorrect, and therefore is widely used in writing without enforcement of rules to the contrary. This is one of those cases where I suspect that people who learn English as a second language are likely to use the language differently because second-language instruction usually teaches a more "formally correct" version of the language than native speakers learn. My impression is that the insistance that "he" is a universal pronoun in written work, which was still widespread when I was in elementary school in the 1980s, has now dropped off considerably, although I haven't actually checked current grammar curricula and I'm not positive about that. But the history of the stance of the Chicago Manual of Style seems to support that. In the above, I can only speak for US English. I don't know what the state of singular "they" in UK English is. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87haty7v5c....@windlord.stanford.edu
