Yvain, I enjoy your posts, and generally find them useful, informative, and well written.
I also recognize that this view is controversial in some circles, but one thing that would make me enjoy them rather more is if you managed to ferret out the implicit assumption that crops up every now and then that your rationalist protagonists are necessarily male. (Or at least predominantly so, I haven’t been back to do an exhaustive stock-take of your gender specific pronoun usage, but I do recall being struck by this at least once before, so I figured it was worth a comment this time.)
Just to clarify, I don’t mean Theo here. If you want to use a specifically male example, that’s fine. But phrases like “the most important reason to argue with someone is to change his mind” and “[e]ither a person has enough of the rationalist virtues to overcome it, or he doesn’t” strike me as problematic.
I’m not for a moment suggesting that you’re being consciously sexist here. In fitting with the theme of this post, I spent a fair while rejecting others’ calls for gender neutral language under the mistaken (largely emotional) impression that agreeing with them would have be an admission of some deep moral flaw in me, rather than merely a small and relatively painless step towards inclusiveness—and ultimately better communication.
I’ve thought about this a few times, and I agree with you that it promotes sexism and is bad, but I just really hate using the phrases “he or she” every time I have to use a pronoun. A sentence like “A rationalist should ensure he or she justifies his or her opinion to himself or herself” is just too awkward to understand. And I am too much of a grammar purist to use “them” as a singular.
I used to use the gender-neutral pronoun “ze”, but people told me they didn’t understand it or didn’t like it or thought it sounded stupid. And I tried using “she” as the default for a while, but people kept getting confused because they weren’t expecting it, and trying to figure out where I’d mentioned a female.
I’m willing to accept whatever the common consensus is here. Maybe Less Wrong-ers are open-minded enough to accept “ze” where the average reader isn’t.
(I’ve heard some people here use “ve” a few times, but from the context I gathered it was more of a way to refer to aliens/AIs/transhumans than a normal gender-neutral pronoun. Is this true?)
I think I remember reading that the plural used to be conventional grammar and was then deliberately suppressed in favor of “he”.
I use the plural. It grows on you surprisingly quickly and isn’t at all obtrusive. Anyone who doesn’t already have the info stored “Oh, Eliezer uses the plural” after reading my writings for months is a case in point thereof.
Use of the plural form also has the advantage of being the stylistic direction the language is trending to. English is a mass hallucination anyways, why stand in futile defiance of its whims?
The grammatical value of “they” used as a singular has been discussed frequently at the inestimable Language Log, including citations of the form used by such disreputable, notorious abusers of the noble English tongue as William Shakespeare and Winston Churchill. A good post on the subject, though by no means the only one, can be found here.
Maybe next time, we can all argue over splitting infinitives, ending sentences with prepositions, or other happy chestnuts of wholly-unfounded prescriptive grammar pedant absurdity.
Iain Banks, in “Player of Games”, also expressed this sentiment pretty well:
“Marain, the Culture’s quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person’s sex in Marain, but they’re not used in everyday conversation; in the archetypal language-as-moral-weapon-and-proud-of-it, the message is that it’s brains that matter, kids; gonads are hardly worth making a distinction over.”
It’s unobtrusive and it has a decent chance of actually catching on, unlike any alternative I’ve ever heard of. There’s something to be said for practicality.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I do appreciate that this inevitably opens up a can of worms, and that no solution is really ideal.
I agree that “he or she” awkward in many, if not most situations. For whatever it’s worth, my preferred solution is to use the plural (they/them/their) in any situation where it’s unambiguous enough to function effectively, and to otherwise use she/her. If people are confused by feminine pronouns… well, that kind of just illustrates the problem, and making them think about that at least serves some sort of purpose.
I am therefore confident that no attentive reader will mistake my repeated use of the generic pronouns “he,” “him,” and “his” for the exclusively masculine pronouns with the same spellings and pronunciations.
Instead of gender neutrality, try to go for gender balance? I use alternate “he” or “she”, and occasionally, semi-intentionally contradict myself [for example, in a talk about Bayes, I explained what I meant by “overconfidence” with an example—the specific numeric example used a name, Sally, and the general definition used “he”. For underconfidence, I used “Barry” and “she” respectively”. I believe Eliezer used to physically flip a coin for he vs. she.
I guess that’s fairer than switching (there might be an unfair on/off pattern), but would take me out of my writing flow, which is why the strict-alternation compromise is what I adopted.
Idea: every once in a while just flip a coin or otherwise generate a bunch of random bits. Save them and load up the file or get out the piece of paper you wrote the results down on or such when you’re ready to start writing. Then simply start peeling the bits off each time you need a new randomly assigned gender.
That doesn’t fix the “flow” issue. When I’m writing, the last thing I want to do is to be flipping through my files, looking for the bit file, etc. etc...
It still means I need to break my typing to look at an external stimulus. Honestly, so far I’ve not seen many instances where strict alternation worked badly, so I’m not motivated to solve this non-problem.
It would be better to flip a coin at the beginning of a document to determine which pronoun to use when the gender is unspecified. That way there is no potential for the reader to be confused by two different pronouns referring to the same abstract entity.
Or we could flip a coin once for all of the English-speaking world, so that we aren’t confused when we go from one document to another. Or we could just standardize on the male pronoun, which has backward-compatibility advantages.
so that we aren’t confused when we go from one document to another
Why, on your view, would going from using “he” to refer to a hypothetical person in one document, to using “she” to refer to a different hypothetical person in a different document, be confusing?
(Not, mind you, that I intend to do this. I’ve been using the gender-neutral third-person plural pronoun consistently in these situations for years and see no reason to stop. )
Hypothetical people, or people of unknown gender, have no gender in reality I can refer to. If I have to treat them as gendered anyway, surely it is easier to have a default gender to fall back on, rather than having to keep track of the particular nonce gender of this particular hypothetical person/person of unknown gender.
For my part, if I’m being told a story about an actual person, whom I don’t know, who is referred to as “him” or “her,” I don’t find it especially confusing to subsequently keep track of their gender.
Nor do I find it significantly more confusing if they are hypothetical instead of actual.
I hadn’t previously realized there were people who differed from me in that regard. That’s useful to know: thanks for clarifying.
Or we could just standardize on the male pronoun, which has backward-compatibility advantages.
I’d be very curious to see a study seeing if this did actually impact what gender people think of examples by default. Note that there have been studies showing that kids are more likely to think of a “fireman” as male than a “firefighter” and for similar roles, but I’m not aware of any such study for pronouns. I suspect you’d have the same result.
I’m not a statistically significant study, but given “The agent’s husband stood up from the table,” I would expect pretty much everyone to assume without much effort that the agent was female, but given “The agent led his husband onto the dance floor,” I’d expect most people to become confused, and some to assume a gay male agent, and very few to assume a female agent.
That suggests that the “his” gets treated as evidence of the referent’s masculinity strong enough to override a strong prior in the other direction.
My predisposition to assume that an agent is male is stronger than my predisposition to assume heteronormative relationships. My immediate reaction to the sentence, “The agent’s husband stood up from the table” was to suppose a male agent with a male spouse. But I’m probably unusual in this regard.
I mean, if you go “I am about to write, so I’ll load up the random male/female file right now” (though I admit, I haven’t tried this and it may very well also be disruptive to quickly tab to that file, check the next random gender and then delete it).
Oh well, if that doesn’t work, then… next idea then. (I don’t have the “next idea”, though, so you or someone else will have to come up with it. :))
Couldn’t you just default to “he” when writing, then when finished, flip a coin (or refer to whatever randomized gender generator you prefer), and go back and change the gender if need be? It wouldn’t interrupt the work flow; it would just be a little work after to revise.
Regarding being a grammar purist, it should be noted that being offended at using ‘them’ as a singular indefinite is a relatively recent trend.
‘ze’ and ‘ve’ are aesthetically unpleasing, but using them more is likely the only way they would become less so. You won’t find me doing it anytime soon though.
It should be noted that until recently, ‘man’ was gender-neutral in English. John Stuart Mill found himself just on the cusp of that, and tried to argue for women’s suffrage in England on the basis that the law referred to ‘man’ and so included women. (he lost). Common archaic equivalents to todays’ ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are ‘were’ and ‘wif’, where ‘man’ meant the whole species (though commonly that only considered males).
‘She’ isn’t that confusing, and radical feminism isn’t the pernicious beast it was in the 90′s, so it seems like ‘she’ is the best bet for a gender-neutral personal pronoun.
Personally, I prefer to invent a subject for such a thought experiment and then use the appropriate pronoun for the person’s gender—which is what you did here with Theo.
Personally, I prefer to invent a subject for such a thought experiment and then use the appropriate pronoun for the person’s gender—which is what you did here with Theo.
The problem with inventing a subject is that people may notice a (unintentional or even nonexistent) trend to always cast one gender as the brave, smart, rational protagonist and the other gender as the cowardly, stupid, silly antagonist.
Personally, I don’t care what technique is used (fictional subject, always “he”, always “she”, “he or she”, “they”, invented pronouns, etc.)
A lot of people object to “he or she” on grounds of euphony; but clarity of meaning should always take priority in our considerations over sound. The fact is that “he or she” is what we actually mean.
Granted, like any phrase, it is inelegant in certain contexts, and can become tiresome if repeated. So one has to use workarounds. Luckily, “they” (always perfectly acceptable in spoken conversation) is also available for judicious written use.
“the most important reason to argue with someone is to change his or her mind” sounds just fine. (“Their” could also be substituted.)
“Either a person has enough of the rationalist virtues to overcome it, or he or she doesn’t” is bad, mainly because of the “or” preceding “he or she”. “He/she doesn’t” is better, but “they don’t” is probably the best (certainly in a comment; maybe a post should be more formal?).
Invented pronouns are just too strange and should be avoided.
but clarity of meaning should always take priority in our considerations over sound.
Agreed. Sound is deeply important though. Most of us on a forum like this spend our days navigating seas of words. To give no consideration to the sound of those words is exceptionally bad fun theory.
And I tried using “she” as the default for a while, but people kept getting confused because they weren’t expecting it, and trying to figure out where I’d mentioned a female.
Yes—and this is the problem. People shouldn’t think that a female pronoun is weird… just because it’s female.
…and you shouldn’t be afraid of using it just because people might think it unusual and get confused for all of two seconds.
If you, and the other more post-prolific and respected members of the community used female pronouns more frequently (ie on average: as often as male ones) then eventually it would become commonplace and people would eventually figure it out.… that it’s just a pronoun. Just like the other one… only female.
Alternatively, a lot of people these days are just fine with “they”/”them”.
Yes we have twisted English into a way it never was used before and it sounds weird to those of us “brought up better”… but this is what happens with languages.
Especially English.
I’m sure I could go through your last post and pick out half a dozen things that, in their time, were considered weird and “not correct English”… until everyone that used to hate them died off and it became just part of common language.
AFAICT, it’s currently the most widely-accepted gender-neutral pronoun. You can fight the tide… or not. :)
I find it very hard to consider that anything but nitpicking. Although that’s probably because my native language is Finnish and it doesn’t have separate third person pronouns for different genders. I don’t think that distinction is worth making.
Then again, since English does have he and she, perhaps one can’t avoid it.
I agree. And after studying Japanese, I started to find it silly that English (like most Western languages) makes the distinction between ‘singular’ and ‘plural’. Like whether we’re talking about exactly 1 thing or any number other than 1 is information important enough to encode with every noun, but it’s usually not worth mentioning what the particular number is.
I feel like mentioning that English seems to be quite tolerant of not making the singular/plural distinction. When borrowing from languages that don’t make this distinction (in my experience, Japanese and Lojban), it seems that people simply use the existing form for both singular and plural: “This gismu is different from all other gismu in that instead of taking just one sumti or finitely many sumti, it can take infinitely many sumti.”
In everyday life, the difference between one and several often is important enough to mention, but it would be too complex to create special grammatical categories for individual numbers.
I’m amazed that ancient people put enough emphasis on past/present/future to justify having irregular verbs. They must have had a very strange conception of time.
But then I’m also amazed that Russian doesn’t have a definite article...
In everyday life, the difference between one and several often is important enough to mention, but it would be too complex to create special grammatical categories for individual numbers.
I think what Thomblake would like (and which is how I understand Japanese to work) is to be to use a noun without specifying whether or not it is plural, and have extra (not necessarily “grammatical categories”) contructs for adding the extra information of whether it is plural or not.
E.g.
“What did you do yesterday?”
“Oh, I hung out with {friend}.”
“Really? Were there a lot of people?”
“Nope, just one {friend}.” / “Yes, many {friend}.” / “Well, it was three {friend}.”
So it’s not new grammatical categories (as long as you don’t consider just prefixing the word “three” to be a new grammatical category).
The way English works, there’s no way to use a noun while leaving the “1 vs not 1” information ambiguous. If you leave off the “s”, you must be referring to exactly one instance. If you put the “s”, you must be referring to a non-1 instance (possibly zero instances).
Yvain, I enjoy your posts, and generally find them useful, informative, and well written.
I also recognize that this view is controversial in some circles, but one thing that would make me enjoy them rather more is if you managed to ferret out the implicit assumption that crops up every now and then that your rationalist protagonists are necessarily male. (Or at least predominantly so, I haven’t been back to do an exhaustive stock-take of your gender specific pronoun usage, but I do recall being struck by this at least once before, so I figured it was worth a comment this time.)
Just to clarify, I don’t mean Theo here. If you want to use a specifically male example, that’s fine. But phrases like “the most important reason to argue with someone is to change his mind” and “[e]ither a person has enough of the rationalist virtues to overcome it, or he doesn’t” strike me as problematic.
I’m not for a moment suggesting that you’re being consciously sexist here. In fitting with the theme of this post, I spent a fair while rejecting others’ calls for gender neutral language under the mistaken (largely emotional) impression that agreeing with them would have be an admission of some deep moral flaw in me, rather than merely a small and relatively painless step towards inclusiveness—and ultimately better communication.
I’m glad you brought that up.
I’ve thought about this a few times, and I agree with you that it promotes sexism and is bad, but I just really hate using the phrases “he or she” every time I have to use a pronoun. A sentence like “A rationalist should ensure he or she justifies his or her opinion to himself or herself” is just too awkward to understand. And I am too much of a grammar purist to use “them” as a singular.
I used to use the gender-neutral pronoun “ze”, but people told me they didn’t understand it or didn’t like it or thought it sounded stupid. And I tried using “she” as the default for a while, but people kept getting confused because they weren’t expecting it, and trying to figure out where I’d mentioned a female.
I’m willing to accept whatever the common consensus is here. Maybe Less Wrong-ers are open-minded enough to accept “ze” where the average reader isn’t.
(I’ve heard some people here use “ve” a few times, but from the context I gathered it was more of a way to refer to aliens/AIs/transhumans than a normal gender-neutral pronoun. Is this true?)
I think I remember reading that the plural used to be conventional grammar and was then deliberately suppressed in favor of “he”.
I use the plural. It grows on you surprisingly quickly and isn’t at all obtrusive. Anyone who doesn’t already have the info stored “Oh, Eliezer uses the plural” after reading my writings for months is a case in point thereof.
Use of the plural form also has the advantage of being the stylistic direction the language is trending to. English is a mass hallucination anyways, why stand in futile defiance of its whims?
The grammatical value of “they” used as a singular has been discussed frequently at the inestimable Language Log, including citations of the form used by such disreputable, notorious abusers of the noble English tongue as William Shakespeare and Winston Churchill. A good post on the subject, though by no means the only one, can be found here.
Maybe next time, we can all argue over splitting infinitives, ending sentences with prepositions, or other happy chestnuts of wholly-unfounded prescriptive grammar pedant absurdity.
Indeed! I pay attention both to gender pronouns and to Eliezer’s writing patterns, and I never noticed this. (Eliezer_2000 used “ve” a lot though.)
I had previously decided on “he” in order to optimize for flow, but I am happy to accept this well-made point and switch to “they’.
Hofstadter has made an excellent argument on this topic called “A Person Paper on Purity in Language”.
Iain Banks, in “Player of Games”, also expressed this sentiment pretty well:
“Marain, the Culture’s quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person’s sex in Marain, but they’re not used in everyday conversation; in the archetypal language-as-moral-weapon-and-proud-of-it, the message is that it’s brains that matter, kids; gonads are hardly worth making a distinction over.”
My preferred sex-neutral pronoun is “they”.
Yes, I also prefer “they”.
It’s unobtrusive and it has a decent chance of actually catching on, unlike any alternative I’ve ever heard of. There’s something to be said for practicality.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I do appreciate that this inevitably opens up a can of worms, and that no solution is really ideal.
I agree that “he or she” awkward in many, if not most situations. For whatever it’s worth, my preferred solution is to use the plural (they/them/their) in any situation where it’s unambiguous enough to function effectively, and to otherwise use she/her. If people are confused by feminine pronouns… well, that kind of just illustrates the problem, and making them think about that at least serves some sort of purpose.
Landsburg:
I’m using this disclaimer from now on. Nearly as hilarious as it is awesome.
Instead of gender neutrality, try to go for gender balance? I use alternate “he” or “she”, and occasionally, semi-intentionally contradict myself [for example, in a talk about Bayes, I explained what I meant by “overconfidence” with an example—the specific numeric example used a name, Sally, and the general definition used “he”. For underconfidence, I used “Barry” and “she” respectively”. I believe Eliezer used to physically flip a coin for he vs. she.
Eliezer still does.
I guess that’s fairer than switching (there might be an unfair on/off pattern), but would take me out of my writing flow, which is why the strict-alternation compromise is what I adopted.
Idea: every once in a while just flip a coin or otherwise generate a bunch of random bits. Save them and load up the file or get out the piece of paper you wrote the results down on or such when you’re ready to start writing. Then simply start peeling the bits off each time you need a new randomly assigned gender.
That doesn’t fix the “flow” issue. When I’m writing, the last thing I want to do is to be flipping through my files, looking for the bit file, etc. etc...
Could you use whether the minute on your clock is odd or even?
It still means I need to break my typing to look at an external stimulus. Honestly, so far I’ve not seen many instances where strict alternation worked badly, so I’m not motivated to solve this non-problem.
It would be better to flip a coin at the beginning of a document to determine which pronoun to use when the gender is unspecified. That way there is no potential for the reader to be confused by two different pronouns referring to the same abstract entity.
Or we could flip a coin once for all of the English-speaking world, so that we aren’t confused when we go from one document to another. Or we could just standardize on the male pronoun, which has backward-compatibility advantages.
Why, on your view, would going from using “he” to refer to a hypothetical person in one document, to using “she” to refer to a different hypothetical person in a different document, be confusing?
(Not, mind you, that I intend to do this. I’ve been using the gender-neutral third-person plural pronoun consistently in these situations for years and see no reason to stop. )
Hypothetical people, or people of unknown gender, have no gender in reality I can refer to. If I have to treat them as gendered anyway, surely it is easier to have a default gender to fall back on, rather than having to keep track of the particular nonce gender of this particular hypothetical person/person of unknown gender.
Interesting.
For my part, if I’m being told a story about an actual person, whom I don’t know, who is referred to as “him” or “her,” I don’t find it especially confusing to subsequently keep track of their gender.
Nor do I find it significantly more confusing if they are hypothetical instead of actual.
I hadn’t previously realized there were people who differed from me in that regard. That’s useful to know: thanks for clarifying.
I’d be very curious to see a study seeing if this did actually impact what gender people think of examples by default. Note that there have been studies showing that kids are more likely to think of a “fireman” as male than a “firefighter” and for similar roles, but I’m not aware of any such study for pronouns. I suspect you’d have the same result.
I’m not a statistically significant study, but given “The agent’s husband stood up from the table,” I would expect pretty much everyone to assume without much effort that the agent was female, but given “The agent led his husband onto the dance floor,” I’d expect most people to become confused, and some to assume a gay male agent, and very few to assume a female agent.
That suggests that the “his” gets treated as evidence of the referent’s masculinity strong enough to override a strong prior in the other direction.
My predisposition to assume that an agent is male is stronger than my predisposition to assume heteronormative relationships. My immediate reaction to the sentence, “The agent’s husband stood up from the table” was to suppose a male agent with a male spouse. But I’m probably unusual in this regard.
I agree with your analysis but I’d like to see some form of formal study confirm it.
I mean, if you go “I am about to write, so I’ll load up the random male/female file right now” (though I admit, I haven’t tried this and it may very well also be disruptive to quickly tab to that file, check the next random gender and then delete it).
Oh well, if that doesn’t work, then… next idea then. (I don’t have the “next idea”, though, so you or someone else will have to come up with it. :))
Couldn’t you just default to “he” when writing, then when finished, flip a coin (or refer to whatever randomized gender generator you prefer), and go back and change the gender if need be? It wouldn’t interrupt the work flow; it would just be a little work after to revise.
For myself, I use the generic feminine wherever possible in writing, but that’s just me. In natural speech, I use they, like everyone else.
Sometimes I flip a coin for each hypothetical person I invoke.
Regarding being a grammar purist, it should be noted that being offended at using ‘them’ as a singular indefinite is a relatively recent trend.
‘ze’ and ‘ve’ are aesthetically unpleasing, but using them more is likely the only way they would become less so. You won’t find me doing it anytime soon though.
It should be noted that until recently, ‘man’ was gender-neutral in English. John Stuart Mill found himself just on the cusp of that, and tried to argue for women’s suffrage in England on the basis that the law referred to ‘man’ and so included women. (he lost). Common archaic equivalents to todays’ ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are ‘were’ and ‘wif’, where ‘man’ meant the whole species (though commonly that only considered males).
‘She’ isn’t that confusing, and radical feminism isn’t the pernicious beast it was in the 90′s, so it seems like ‘she’ is the best bet for a gender-neutral personal pronoun.
Personally, I prefer to invent a subject for such a thought experiment and then use the appropriate pronoun for the person’s gender—which is what you did here with Theo.
The problem with inventing a subject is that people may notice a (unintentional or even nonexistent) trend to always cast one gender as the brave, smart, rational protagonist and the other gender as the cowardly, stupid, silly antagonist.
Personally, I don’t care what technique is used (fictional subject, always “he”, always “she”, “he or she”, “they”, invented pronouns, etc.)
Flip a coin?
A lot of people object to “he or she” on grounds of euphony; but clarity of meaning should always take priority in our considerations over sound. The fact is that “he or she” is what we actually mean.
Granted, like any phrase, it is inelegant in certain contexts, and can become tiresome if repeated. So one has to use workarounds. Luckily, “they” (always perfectly acceptable in spoken conversation) is also available for judicious written use.
“the most important reason to argue with someone is to change his or her mind” sounds just fine. (“Their” could also be substituted.)
“Either a person has enough of the rationalist virtues to overcome it, or he or she doesn’t” is bad, mainly because of the “or” preceding “he or she”. “He/she doesn’t” is better, but “they don’t” is probably the best (certainly in a comment; maybe a post should be more formal?).
Invented pronouns are just too strange and should be avoided.
Agreed. Sound is deeply important though. Most of us on a forum like this spend our days navigating seas of words. To give no consideration to the sound of those words is exceptionally bad fun theory.
Still sexist, for the reason “whe or ble” is still racist.
Also, down with the gender binary. Do we actually mean that we should argue with men and women to change their minds, but not with genderqueers?
FYI: I use this Chrome extension to gender-neutralize what I read: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-ungender/blfboedipjpaphkkdoddffpnfjknfeda?hl=en
Yes—and this is the problem. People shouldn’t think that a female pronoun is weird… just because it’s female. …and you shouldn’t be afraid of using it just because people might think it unusual and get confused for all of two seconds.
If you, and the other more post-prolific and respected members of the community used female pronouns more frequently (ie on average: as often as male ones) then eventually it would become commonplace and people would eventually figure it out.… that it’s just a pronoun. Just like the other one… only female.
Alternatively, a lot of people these days are just fine with “they”/”them”.
Yes we have twisted English into a way it never was used before and it sounds weird to those of us “brought up better”… but this is what happens with languages.
Especially English.
I’m sure I could go through your last post and pick out half a dozen things that, in their time, were considered weird and “not correct English”… until everyone that used to hate them died off and it became just part of common language.
AFAICT, it’s currently the most widely-accepted gender-neutral pronoun. You can fight the tide… or not. :)
Please stick with “he”.
I agree that it’s imperfect, but inelegance matters.
If inelegance is your primary concern, then “she” seems at least as good, and probably a lesser evil for other reasons.
I find using she exclusively offensive.
I find it very hard to consider that anything but nitpicking. Although that’s probably because my native language is Finnish and it doesn’t have separate third person pronouns for different genders. I don’t think that distinction is worth making.
Then again, since English does have he and she, perhaps one can’t avoid it.
I agree. And after studying Japanese, I started to find it silly that English (like most Western languages) makes the distinction between ‘singular’ and ‘plural’. Like whether we’re talking about exactly 1 thing or any number other than 1 is information important enough to encode with every noun, but it’s usually not worth mentioning what the particular number is.
ETA: exactly what Nebu said below.
I feel like mentioning that English seems to be quite tolerant of not making the singular/plural distinction. When borrowing from languages that don’t make this distinction (in my experience, Japanese and Lojban), it seems that people simply use the existing form for both singular and plural: “This gismu is different from all other gismu in that instead of taking just one sumti or finitely many sumti, it can take infinitely many sumti.”
Doesn’t even have to be non-english words:
“this sheep is different from other sheep in that it thinks that it is a fish unlike these fish that think they are sheep”
/contrived_example
In everyday life, the difference between one and several often is important enough to mention, but it would be too complex to create special grammatical categories for individual numbers.
I’m amazed that ancient people put enough emphasis on past/present/future to justify having irregular verbs. They must have had a very strange conception of time.
But then I’m also amazed that Russian doesn’t have a definite article...
I think what Thomblake would like (and which is how I understand Japanese to work) is to be to use a noun without specifying whether or not it is plural, and have extra (not necessarily “grammatical categories”) contructs for adding the extra information of whether it is plural or not.
E.g.
“What did you do yesterday?”
“Oh, I hung out with {friend}.”
“Really? Were there a lot of people?”
“Nope, just one {friend}.” / “Yes, many {friend}.” / “Well, it was three {friend}.”
So it’s not new grammatical categories (as long as you don’t consider just prefixing the word “three” to be a new grammatical category).
The way English works, there’s no way to use a noun while leaving the “1 vs not 1” information ambiguous. If you leave off the “s”, you must be referring to exactly one instance. If you put the “s”, you must be referring to a non-1 instance (possibly zero instances).