I'm convinced. Where can I mention that women are very welcome? [LWN.net]

I'm convinced. Where can I mention that women are very welcome?

Posted Aug 29, 2009 22:05 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: I'm convinced. Where can I mention that women are very welcome? by coriordan
Parent article: FSF to host a mini-summit on Women in Free Software

And oh *god* is it annoying. I had to search-and-replace the things before I could read it.

You cannot invent new pronouns on the fly. You just can't. They're one of the most stable aspects of any language, and resist change strongly (as indicated by the fact that you can see the bones of PIE in English pronouns even now, despite their radical changes due to Anglo-Norman influence on Old English, and that the things are still inflected at least 750 years after everything else lost inflection). The creation of new gender-neutral pronouns has been attempted over and over by people who dislike or don't know about singular they. It's failed every single time, and always will.

(Or, rather, you *can* invent new pronouns on the fly, if you don't mind throwing landmines in the ease-of-reading of all your readers. I can confidently assert that they will never be commonly used, and will always annoy and confuse readers. So don't do it, OK? We have a gender-neutral pronoun, even if it is rather annoying to use.)

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I'm convinced. Where can I mention that women are very welcome?

Posted Aug 30, 2009 1:01 UTC (Sun) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

Let's not get carried away.

Singular they can lead to ambiguity. Relacing "he" with "they" breaks this sentence:

"If the crowd doesn't leave the owner's office now, he could be stuck there all night."

And it can also change the tone. No problem in formal writing, and I use it in that situation, but just like using "one" changes your tone (and is likely to offend in informal settings), using third-person "they" can be inappropriate in some settings.

The problem has no perfect solution. Stallman tried to help by propagating the "Per/pers/perself" suggestions of the gender neutral language movement, but it didn't take off.

I'm convinced. Where can I mention that women are very welcome?

Posted Aug 30, 2009 2:17 UTC (Sun) by hypatiadotca (guest, #60478) [Link]

"The crowd could be stuck there all night if they don't leave the owner's office now."

Presumably the owner is known to be male or female anyway, but a 3-second look at that sentence told me how to rephrase it in any event. It does get easier once you start writing for neutrality on a regular basis.

It's even a plural "they" in this case :)

I've mentioned it else-thread, but Miller and Swift's "Handbook of Nonsexist Writing" is really a fantastic resource on the topic. I refer to it on at least a weekly basis.

The one word I haven't found a decent neutral version for is "handyman". "Fixer" just doesn't have the same flavour to it, and "repair person" is just meh.