On Thu Oct 24 13:48:19 2019 Greg Wooledge <wool...@eeg.ccf.org> wrote:
>> >>> Even though in some situations "guys" is claimed to be a >> >>> gender-neutral word, I doubt that everyone thinks of themselves >> >>> as a "guy". And it will be polite to those people to not make >> >>> them choose between doing that or feeling excluded. > [...] >> This should be on the wiki and on the guidelines for the Debian's >> mailing list. >> For non-native English speakers those subtlety are hard to >> comprehend! :) > > There's no consensus for how to handle gender neutrality, even among > native speakers. The English language isn't built for it. Every > single approach is wrong, so basically you have to choose which > wrongness you can tolerate. > > "It" is considered offensive, because it implies that the antecedent > is not a person. > > "They" is grammatically horrible because it's clearly a plural > pronoun, not a singular pronoun. > > "He/She" or "him/her" is just clumsy and awkward. > > "Sie" or "xie" or similar German-derived words just sound ridiculous > and made-up, at least to those of us who don't speak German. > > Just try to do the best you can. Nobody has any good answers yet. Back when all this Political Correctness silliness was getting started, someone suggested "s/h/it". -- /~\ cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid (Charlie Gibbs) \ / I'm really at ac.dekanfrus if you read it the right way. X Top-posted messages will probably be ignored. See RFC1855. / \ "Alexa, define 'bugging'."
