upvote
Or, best known to others as being the guy that made Gravity Google way back when.
reply
[flagged]
reply
And r08064!
reply
[flagged]
reply
There are a lot of opposition-worthy linguistic acrobatics within that space, but default they/them is none of them.

It works perfectly. It is inoffensive, a drop-in-replacement, doesn't elongate sentences or any other such negative side effects.

It's real known words not just freshly invented. And it's even semantically correct.

The they/them swap is the most elegant implementation I am aware of.

reply
> The they/them swap is the most elegant implementation I am aware of.

Far from it, it only creates confusion and injects ideologically charged "pronoun language" into the discussion. If you feel the need to make clear that yes, the person you're talking about can be a man as well as a woman - something which most people realise and the ones who don't won't anyway no matter which words you use - use something like s/he or "he or she". The first form is just as short, is not ideologically charged and does not create ambiguity.

reply
What confusion does it create?

You may genuinely not know the gender of an online nickname, and, frankly, you also don't really have to know? Why share this metadata in the first place.

I kinda see your point regarding "it pulls in culture war", but, to be fair, it's "they/them". Language that - in this very usage - predates the culture war by centuries.

So.. idk I think you might be wrong here.

reply
"They" is plural AND singular. Obviously it creates confusion.
reply
Fair pushback, however, again, I would ask to which degree and to what end.

"There is an entity named doob, and they are responsible for this thing" at least to me kinda solves the exact thing (attribution, "where to ask questions") it needs to solve, while simultaneously encoding the least amount of metadata possible.

(Okay technically the entity is named mrdoob as an opaque string, but "there is an entity named doob" was more fun to type)

reply
Unless they are non-binary? But in some languages you'll still run into trouble. In Italian, if your masculine, it's non-binario, and if you're feminine, it's non-binaria.
reply
> In Italian, if your masculine, it's non-binario, and if you're feminine, it's non-binaria.

Haha what the fuck. Who implemented that oh my god.

Genuine question though. That cannot be grassroots, can it? Because it completely defeats the purpose of that. Did this just come up because someone _had_ to translate the english culture war during news reporting?

reply
His brand is literally "Mr Doob"

The consensus in English-writing guides like the APA or Elements of Style is about staying true to a person's self-identified pronoun while preferring specificity over ambiguity. In a case where you don't know - "they" is perfectly acceptable. In a case where "they" is an explicit self-identity - it's the only correct option. In this case, where he literally calls himself "Mr", it's stylistically incorrect to choose a more ambiguous pronoun where "he" is the correct one for someone calling themselves "mr"

reply
Hm. Interesting argument, but I kinda disagree with the premise that "if we have anything exposing gender metadata, the rest of the language around it in a sentence must be pulled into referencing that to be more correct".

It's a coherent thing to argue for, I'll give you that, but it's also.. kinda arbitrary? And one can make an equally convincing case for statelessness in the sense that just because one word carries metadata, doesn't mean that the other words around it must react to it.

reply
You're making a straw-man argument with "anything exposing gender metadata". It's not like I dug up some obscure article - it's literally his chosen brand name. There's nothing arbitrary to use "he" for somebody who calls himself "mr".

Is it possible that you have a good point about inclusive writing in general, but you just happened to hop on the wrong case to make your stand, didn't realize that we're talking about an explicit "mr"?

reply
Huh?

Isn't a strawman something I would make up that you would have said to then attack it?

reply
It won’t mind.
reply