- #1
ehrenfest
- 2,020
- 1
The English language needs a gender-neutral third person pronoun that can refer to people. Without one, we need to find out either the name of a person or his/her gender or something about the person in order to refer to him/her in a sentence. This can be very awkward for several reasons. Either you always say both possibilities like "he or she","him or her", or you can violate grammar by saying "they" when referring to a single person or you can try to avoid it by repeatedly saying "this person". If you make a mistake and refer to a "she" as "he" or vice versa, that could probably lose you a job or something.
There is simply NO reason why the genital attachments of a person should affect how you refer to them in a discussion. By that logic, we should have a different third person pronouns for people who lost an arm or a leg or something. They are missing something usually extended from a place on their body. We sure can't call them "he" or "she".
In sum, I think this is a disgusting relic of our sexist ancestry and we MUST take action to get rid of this. I propose that we begin by taking action with our posts on PF. This problem is especially prevalent here because usernames may tell us nothing about someones gender.
There are a lot of related problems like the word "Chairman" or "alumnus" or "policeman" and all of these are an embarrassment of the English language. We need to take action to resolve this problem and we can start on PF.
Oh yeah, and a very prolific mathematician agrees with me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun
There is simply NO reason why the genital attachments of a person should affect how you refer to them in a discussion. By that logic, we should have a different third person pronouns for people who lost an arm or a leg or something. They are missing something usually extended from a place on their body. We sure can't call them "he" or "she".
In sum, I think this is a disgusting relic of our sexist ancestry and we MUST take action to get rid of this. I propose that we begin by taking action with our posts on PF. This problem is especially prevalent here because usernames may tell us nothing about someones gender.
There are a lot of related problems like the word "Chairman" or "alumnus" or "policeman" and all of these are an embarrassment of the English language. We need to take action to resolve this problem and we can start on PF.
Oh yeah, and a very prolific mathematician agrees with me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun