It is necessary? is it unnecessary? Does it give you the same? What do you think?
I liked using what was then archaic language back in school 20 years ago. I’ll be one of the last ones to change.
I don’t care. I am Australian so everyone is mate. unless I forget their name then they are whatsTheirFace.
I sometimes use whovidoovits (not sure of the spelling)
It’s mate, but if I forget their name, it’s ‘old mate’
I thought everyone’s a cunt?
Only if you like them.
Only if you are a bogan.
Why would I want to use exclusive language? If I know it’s going to make someone feel worse instead of better, why would I use?
The only argument for not using it that I can think of is that you don’t give a shit about other people…
The alternative is not exclusive, but traditional. Some words have double meaning, traditionally. A word “man”, for example, can mean male, but can also be inclusive. Nobody in the right mind would argue that the word “mankind” means only male part of humanity.
Plenty do.
Well, then as my sentence states, they are not in the right mind.
Traditional homonyms reinforce ingrained cultural stereotypes.
Nobody in the right mind would argue that the word “mankind” means only male part of humanity.
Perhaps not, but it does support the outdated tradition of considering the male gender to be the “default person”. This has had many lasting negative consequences, in areas ranging from scientific research to product design.
I seriously do not think that when people use the word mankind they do anything that has negative consequences. The word has very gender neutral meaning today and if anyone would want today to change it, then they actually do disservice to equality movement because they look like crazies.
I feel that using it is important so that more people can feel included in what you’re writing about. Say you’re writing a news story, you would want as many people to agree as possible and support you. Last thing you want is to upset a minority group because then what happens is that people that aren’t monorities that do have influences won’t even invest in you.
On the other hand, should someone be forced into using inclusive language? I don’t think so. Just don’t expect as much respect from as many people.
What do you mean by inclusive language?
For example using “they” instead of “he” or “she”.
I speak Spanish too so it’s a little bit more complicated than English.
Edit: I believe you can use “it” too if someone feels like a thing.
The “they” thing makes a lot of sense. I write a fair bit of documentation, and I make a point of referring to generic people/roles without gendered pronouns. If I’m talking about “a user”, I’ll refer to them as “them” or “the user.”
At this point, I’m not sure what the alternatives are. Assuming gender seems very 1960s. Assigning a name (like “Alice” or “Bob”) complicates the text too much.
When I talk to you, I use “you” and “you are”. It is quite logical when I talk about you in third person, I can use “they”, “they are”.
“them” is so much better than the alternatives for when you don’t know a person’s gender.
“Him”? 50% chance of being wrong and sounding stupid.
“Him or her”? 3x as many syllables.
“It”? Sounds like talking about an object, and when talking about someone you don’t know the gender of, you’re often talking about objects in the same sentence too. So “them” specifies the person, and “it” specifies the object.
“the [noun]”? Often requires more syllables, sometimes many more.
For example…
“[…] Always print the receipt and hand it to them directly.”
We know that “it” is the receipt, and “them” refers to the customer/person. Any alternative would be wrong/awkward or too many syllables.
2010 called, they want their cringe pfp back.
Inclusive language isn’t even a particularly new “woke” thing. The phrase “Ladies and gentlemen” goes way way back.
I’m going to assume you’re in the white men majority, probably christian, so it seems weird to you because by default, people use he/him and male centric wording. Lets flip it for a second: female is now the default. You’re presumed to be a woman unless proven otherwise. Everything starts with “Ladies, welcome to the show”. All the products are pink and advertised to women, unless it’s specifically a men’s product, and when it does, it clearly says “for men” like you’re a special kind of human. You buy a wrench “for men” to fix your car. People always talk to your wife first, as you’re just the wife’s husband she’s hauling around. How do you feel? Pretty excluded right?
That’s why we use inclusive language. And we didn’t even touch LGBTQ+ issues yet.
It’s not hard to not make assumptions. I can use “OP claimed they did X” instead of "OP claimed she did ", with zero loss of information, but the first one is right whether you’re a man or woman, the other assumes you’re a woman and implies you’re unusual for not being a woman, you’re the other kind that needs to be explicitly mentioned. And it happens all day, everyday, all the time.
So, if you want to include everyone, you don’t make gender, race, political alignment or religious assumptions unless you know for sure. It’s basic respect, it’s free, and it makes some people happier, so why not do it?
Pretty reasonable mate, personally as I speak English and Spanish it’s very simple to use inclusive lang in English, but in Spanish it’s a mess.
Thx for your opinión.
I speak french, I can definitely understand the mess that it is (and the currently accepted neutral pronouns are… not great). Fortunately in those languages we’re also just kinda accepting we’re stuck with it for the foreseeable future, it’s not like we can have a french 2.0 where my desk is genderless.
Ultimately it’s respect. You don’t have to go all out of your way to be inclusive, but trying your best to be is a nice gesture overall.
This might not be the right place for a linguistic history lesson, but how did that happen in the first place? Why does your desk have a gender? It sounds creepy thinking about it now. Who looked at a desk, or a spoon and thought “ah, that’s a ‘she’, then looked at a door and said ‘yep, definitely a ‘he’ right there…”
It’s kinda weird because you somehow intuitively know which gender it’s gonna be, it’s got to have some pattern to it in some way. I think it comes down to sounds, “la/une table” vs “le/un table”, “le/un bureau” vs “la/une bureau”. Except when we decide fuck it we’ll just say “l’amour”, “l’argent” so it’s like, only tangible things can be gendered but also intangible things inherently sound weird if you do try to slap a “le/un” or “la/une” before it, so like the whole sound of the word somewhat carries its gender? Things in “-ette” are pretty much always female.
The more you think about it the weirder it gets with exceptions and edge cases.
Who looked at a desk, or a spoon and thought “ah, that’s a ‘she’, then looked at a door and said ‘yep, definitely a ‘he’ right there…”
Thinking about it, it sounds about right. If I were to name a thing, I’d probably just pick what sounds best kinda like you’d name a pet or baby except you’re not constrained to a gender.
I’d definitely enjoy a good read on how the fuck we ended up there. It seems to affect most romance languages so it’s gotta go way back. I think the genders are mostly matched with spanish too, like, tables are also female in spanish iirc.
It’s always good to consider your audience, I guess is my take. So for instance, since my development team at work ia comprised of both men and women, I don’t used the term “boyscout changes” and instead just “scout changes.”
But also, I’m not gonna nitpick and get lost in nuance. For instance, the exclamation of “DUDE!” has no gender connotations to me. And if it offends someone… get over it dude.
Asks a neutral question about how the community feels: gets downvoted. I swear the Internet is just echo chambers now.
Even if you have strong opinions (in either direction) on the subject, use this as an opportunity to express that point of view. Are we really so sensitive as to be mad for someone asking the question?
While I totally agree with you: OP does have an “anonymous” PFP and their username is “Politically Incorrect”, so it is a bit easy to assume their question is bad faith trolling from a 4channer.
I generally use “they” if I’m talking about an unknown or indeterminate person, like “someone forgot their umbrella here. They are going to get wet”, “if one of our clients has a problem with our software, they will tell us”, etc.
I don’t fuck with “they” for talking about someone specific. I always find it irritating when someone says something like “Alice is going to the shop. They are going to buy a dress”, or “Geoff is going to watch the hockey match. They are a fan of the Habs.” It just sounds clunky and like intentionally being obtuse for the sake of shoehorning in one’s politics.
What if Alice has told you their preferred pronouns are they/them? Would you still call them ‘her’ in spite of their wishes?
If Geoff is happy with being called ‘he’, then sure, he went to the match.
I think it only sounds clunky because we’re not so used to it. Imagine a child today being brought up knowing “they” is a perfectly normal individual or group pronoun alongside he and she. In ten years, it won’t sound weird to them (hah) at all.
I think gendered pronouns (he/she) kinda suck and cause more problems than they’re worth. Sure they solve grammatical ambiguity in writing, I guess, but other than that they don’t really add anything. But on the downside they encourage either “male first” or very clunky (“he or she”) language. Not to mention the fact that it causes referring to significant groups of the population to suddenly become a “gender politics” issue, and is used as a tool to hurt said people.
Personally, I think “they” should always be acceptable and we should get rid of gender connotations for words like “dude”. In modern times where you can talk to people without physically looking at them (like here for example, you don’t know how I present IRL), there’s no reason for gender to even be a part of people’s identity any more than, for example, what sublemmys they follow or what instance they are on.
… But of course, I don’t see that happening, at least soon, but I do think in 2024 there is no excuse not to use gender neutral words if it’s ambiguous.
I also have some thoughts on “autistic people” vs “people with autism”, but I’m not sure if that’s what’s being discussed here or of interest to anyone, so I’ll leave it be. :P
Consider a reversal:
Imagine just how consistently-offended we guys’d be, if the term for an uncrewed vehicle was “unwomaned”.
So, it was either “womaned” or “unwomaned”.
Insulting-as-hell, right?
It’s equally insulting, the other-way-'round, but we’re concertedly conditioned to feeling it to be “normal”.
That’s the only difference: our imprinting.
This is a decades-old demonstration of how prejudiced it is to use a single pronoun “Mr.” for guys, while using 2 different pronouns for women, depending-on marital-status.
Hofstadter remapped it from married-status-of-women to employed-status-of-blacks, to show how prejudiced it is, in spite of our imprinting.
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html
Eh, it costs me nothing, makes some people feel respected, ans allows me to piss off idiots. What’s not to love?
I think inclusive language is a way to pat ourselves on the back when we really should be enacting inclusive behavior.
Changing language is always tempting because it’s a zero-effort way to do nothing and appear like you’re doing something.
Inclusive language per se not a problem, but it’s far too easy for it to act as an empty virtue signal.
Here’s an example of an inclusive behavior: next time you’re thinking of cutting someone out of your life, don’t.
See what I mean? There’s gonna be people who would take offense at the idea of letting someone stay in your life, giving them another chance, because it could be unsafe or it’s not your job or something.
But keeping people around is the definition of inclusion. Inclusive language allows us to think of ourselves as inclusive without actually being inclusive.
