If you don’t know the gender, the polite thing to do is to use a gender-neutral pronoun like “they”. In this case, it was readily apparent to me that it was a Japanese name with the feminine suffix “-ko”, but your mileage may vary.
Thanks, I normally do that, more because it is cognitively easier than being polite. I honestly think it has more to do with my learning Spanish gender suffixes long ago, as this issue crops up in my daily life at times. If the word ends in ‘o’, I just gravitate to thinking of it as male.
I shall try to think of “-ko” as a feminine suffix. I’m looking at you, Kinko’s.
I shall try to think of “-ko” as a feminine suffix. I’m looking at you, Kinko’s.
Parsing it that way makes me think of “Kinko” as an incredibly cute name, especially if I interpret “kin” as a word—so “kinko” would mean something like “little female cousin” or “little sister” or something.
I’m obligated to point out the intrinsic risk of this way of thinking, as the uneducated can mistake the less common masculine suffix -hiko for a regular -ko. This is really the reason why romanization is such a travesty; none of this would have happened in beautiful kanji...
Fortunately 7:00am tenshiko is playing on a completely different team; the competition only really starts with 4:30 tenshiko, the first of the doubles to come home from school. To my frustration, 10:30 tenshiko, 10:45 tenshiko, and 11:00 tenshiko have now become regular players. I’m trying to figure out how to dissuade them, but they tell me that feeling tired in the morning is something I should blame on 7:00am tenshiko because teenagers are designed to go to bed at midnight and wake up at ten. (7:00am tenshiko has tried to defend herself with the allegation that waking up with an alarm clock is intrinsically less restful than waking up naturally, but nobody really cares.)
Don’t sweat about it, although I have to say this is the first time that’s actually happened to me personally on the Internet, sticking mostly to venues where there’s a genre field or areas that are female-dominated, like FF.net and Livejournal.
The funny thing is that tenshiko is a distinctly feminine name in Moonspeak, meaning most literally heaven-messenger-child, more figuratively “angel girl” (the suffix for child is used in the modern era exclusively for girls). I figured if beizutsukai is thrown around here with its ridiculous claimed pronunciation of “beiztskai”, I can justify using a trendily translated version of my name as an alias.
And 8am tenshiko forms coalitions with 8:15am tenshiko to sleep just a bit longer, causing 9am tenshiko to curse the laziness of her sleeping peers.
Edit: Dang it! I was just thinking about gender pronouns like an hour before writing this, and I still did the default male!
If you don’t know the gender, the polite thing to do is to use a gender-neutral pronoun like “they”. In this case, it was readily apparent to me that it was a Japanese name with the feminine suffix “-ko”, but your mileage may vary.
Thanks, I normally do that, more because it is cognitively easier than being polite. I honestly think it has more to do with my learning Spanish gender suffixes long ago, as this issue crops up in my daily life at times. If the word ends in ‘o’, I just gravitate to thinking of it as male.
I shall try to think of “-ko” as a feminine suffix. I’m looking at you, Kinko’s.
Parsing it that way makes me think of “Kinko” as an incredibly cute name, especially if I interpret “kin” as a word—so “kinko” would mean something like “little female cousin” or “little sister” or something.
Kin actually means gold/metal, so it would mean “gold child”, so golden girl! That would be adorable!
I didn’t know that “kin” was even a word in Japanese; I was parsing it as English. “Gold child” is adorable too!
I’m obligated to point out the intrinsic risk of this way of thinking, as the uneducated can mistake the less common masculine suffix -hiko for a regular -ko. This is really the reason why romanization is such a travesty; none of this would have happened in beautiful kanji...
Fortunately 7:00am tenshiko is playing on a completely different team; the competition only really starts with 4:30 tenshiko, the first of the doubles to come home from school. To my frustration, 10:30 tenshiko, 10:45 tenshiko, and 11:00 tenshiko have now become regular players. I’m trying to figure out how to dissuade them, but they tell me that feeling tired in the morning is something I should blame on 7:00am tenshiko because teenagers are designed to go to bed at midnight and wake up at ten. (7:00am tenshiko has tried to defend herself with the allegation that waking up with an alarm clock is intrinsically less restful than waking up naturally, but nobody really cares.)
Don’t sweat about it, although I have to say this is the first time that’s actually happened to me personally on the Internet, sticking mostly to venues where there’s a genre field or areas that are female-dominated, like FF.net and Livejournal.
The funny thing is that tenshiko is a distinctly feminine name in Moonspeak, meaning most literally heaven-messenger-child, more figuratively “angel girl” (the suffix for child is used in the modern era exclusively for girls). I figured if beizutsukai is thrown around here with its ridiculous claimed pronunciation of “beiztskai”, I can justify using a trendily translated version of my name as an alias.