> maybe the next language you should consider studying is English

Personal swipes are not allowed in Hacker News comments, regardless of how annoying or provocative some other comment may have been.

(I'm inclined to say that pronoun wars shouldn't be, either, considering the madness that this thread devolved into.)

Gender neutral pronouns can only refer to abstract persons

> "The student will have to read this book carefully if he wishes to do well." - OK

> "A student is expected to attend 90% of the lectures, or he will be in trouble." - WRONG, if your audience has women

> "Julia thought she did well on the exam and he was right." - WRONG

> "Julia thought she did well on the exam and they were right." - WRONG

Wow, that's some extraordinary condescension.

They/them/their has been seeing broad adoption as a, y'know, actually gender-neutral pronoun, and it should be encouraged. I know some people prefer he/him/his but

a) many people think that reeks of implicit sexism

b) even ignoring a), elevating that to The One Correct English Way is ridiculous overreach

Claiming that the author is sexist for using "he" in a gender neutral setting, which has been standard practice for decades, is an over-reach.

Is "they" or "him/her" a better way forward? Sure. Is it standard practice? No. Can you infer anything about the author's attitudes by his use of standard English grammar? No.

Meh, I like 'hen'[0] a lot, wouldn't mind seeing a concerted effort to introduce it in English as well. I doubt it would go over well in the states, however.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hen_%28pronoun%29

Unfortunately, pronouns are a closed class[1] in English; the possibility of getting people to adopt a new one is vanishingly unlikely. Fortunately, we already have “they”, which has been used as a gender-neutral pronoun in the singular for at least half a millennium.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Part_of_speech#Open_and_closed...

Interesting, hadn't heard about closed/open classes in speech. I agree that "they" serves the purpose well, but it's nice to see an explicit, consciousness-raising fix (though it's the ultimate bikeshed politically, everyone feels they're qualified to comment - even me!)

Interesting how you focused on "he/him/his" when I said "He/She" and "his/hers", noting that either gender based term can be used in a gender neutral manner, but that "traditionally the masculine form is used". My point was to indicate that it is common enough that insult should not have been taken to the original post.

I certainly never said anything about "The One Correct English Way".

As for the condescension; yes that was intended. The response was overly hostile and out of line so the condescension was deserved IMHO. Don't worry yourself though Mike; I spread around the condescension equally to all genders.

> I spread around the condescension equally

Please don't spread any more condescension on Hacker News. Although I'm sure you don't mean to, it's one of the worst things you could do to damage this community.

I think I've only seen "they" used as a gender-neutral pronoun once or twice, outside of contexts where the topic itself is gender neutral pronouns. So going by that experience, I don't have much faith in broad adoption if the term can't seem to penetrate usage in writing outside of contexts where people are actively discussing the term itself.

Shakespeare good enough for you? http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002748.h... or Jane Austen? http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austhlis.html

For more fun facts and rants about gender-neutral they, see: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005423.h...

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Note: there's a strong difference between gender-neutral they when the gender is unknown, and singular they when the gender is known. Some people actually prefer being referred to with 'they/their' in sentences such as "Mary finished their ph.d. at Oxford". I doubt you'll find much historic precedence for that usage, but the use of 'their' when the gender is unknown/unspecified has a long history.

Well, each to their own.

I myself use they as a neutral pronoun, but I'd suggest that Shakespeare and Austen aren't great examples, especially the former, as the poster was looking for widespread adoption and those authors[1] both use language in ways that are very uncommon.

[1]: this right here is why 'they' as neutral is problematic, as I would have been able to use 'they' unambiguously (instead of 'those authors') had 'they' not grown a singular meaning. It's the point made above about two dimensions rather than one of uncertainty.

Maybe not the best examples, but people do tend to think of the usage as something new, while it's been around forever.

I wouldn't say "they both" is very number-ambiguous, though sure you can always find ambiguous examples, but then language is full of ambiguity and humans still seem to manage fine.

> Maybe not the best examples, but people do tend to think of the usage as something new, while it's been around forever.

To bad then that I never said anything about history, but just widespread adoption. So there is not much need to condescendingly point out Shakespeare and Austen, when they are just tangentially related.

> I don't have much faith in broad adoption if the term can't seem to penetrate usage in writing outside of contexts where people are actively discussing the term itself.

The usage doesn't need to spread beyond discussions of the term itself, because it was already being used long before these discussions. That's why I linked to the articles about Shakespeare's and Austen's usage, they are data. I find it a bit of a stretch to interpret that as me saying "you obviously haven't read Shakespeare and Austen" (in any case, I've never read Austen myself and definitely can't remember what pronouns Shakespeare used from what little we read in school; I leave it to the historical linguists to dig out the usage examples).

Back to the matter at hand, if you want something definitely contemporary, of the five first tweets at https://twitter.com/search?q=they I see two which could have been replaced with "he" ("if someone wants to follow you {he,they}'ll follow", "Never miss an opportunity to tell someone how much {he,they} mean to you.").

> The usage doesn't need to spread beyond discussions of the term itself, because it was already being used long before these discussions.

My mistake. I should have known that someone would take the opportunity to mince words when we're on the topic of language and communication, if it would suit their goal.

To be more concrete: I meant penetrate usage in writing in a contemporary setting. I don't know if it penetrated usage over a hundred years ago if it isn't relevant to written communication today. I communicate with people in this era, not with people from the past. Debating whether using a gendered pronoun obscures meaning or not implicitly refers to communication in this day and age, not the past.

Is that supposed to prove something? Well, I guess it proves that I don't read such classic authors, which is right. My background and experience is more humble, mostly to do with writing and reading things in online forums like this or other contemporary settings.

But if you want to be an elitist and dismiss my experience over not being literate with the classics, go ahead.

(Only on Hacker News -- a discussion on point-free style devolves into a discussion on gender-free style!)