!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
“Every customer should be greeted when they walk into the store.”
The singular “they” is traditional in English - it is very much proper English and has been around (iirc) since the 17th century. It’s only a big deal now because conservatives want to make gender a factor in elections.
Thanks!
I have always loved the OED. As a kid I used to sit in the library and just read it. It was always a dream of mine to buy my own copy and just have it the way people used to have encyclopedias.
Well said! My go-to example is ‘If someone calls and I’m not here, tell them they can leave a message’ because it covers both they and them in a singular usage.
Sidenote: I also hate the way that some people act like languages are static things, despite the known history of languages to shift and change over time. English is arguably a German creole; we don’t get to act all sanctimonious now.
If we actually followed the "your gender identity is mildly inconvenient to me so should be banned" crowd and made everything unambiguously gendered, language would become far more awkward.
"If someone calls and I'm not there, tell him or her that he or she can leave a message".
We could start doing this right now -- every time ~~they~~ he or she uses the word "they", insist ~~they~~ he or she repeats ~~themselves~~ himself or herself in a way that leaves no gender ambiguity..
That's a good explanation. English isn't my native language, and I always found the they/them weird sounding. With that sentence of the customer you made it click for me. Thanks!
i had an English teacher in high school that insisted sentences like this were grammatically incorrect (subject/verb disagreement, number), and should be, "Every customer should be greeted when he or she walks into the store," or "All customers should be greeted when they walk into the store."
I found them annoying.
"They" is the traditional English-language pronoun when an unknown person could be of either gender. "Mommy, my teacher said a funny thing at school today!" "Oh? What did they say?"
Teacher is singular, but assigning a gender would feel awkward if one doesn't know, so "they" is used instead.
Why not just pick new words to use?
Because the current word for it works just fine?
And also because when people try to use neopronouns they take as much flak for that if not more. Imagine this same argument: "I'm not used to these newfangled pronouns. Why can't they just use normal ones?"
As someone speaking German, a brutally gendered language, let me tell you, they/them is awesome and I'd love to have something similar in German. There is so much fighting and discussions about "gendern" and it consumes so much energy that could be better spent elsewhere. And conservatives are having a field trip with this.
Looking for a new word is equally as hard if not way harder than using what already works fine.
Yes I would love for the German language to have an equivalent for they/them. It's also so awkward talking about someone who is non binary and neither uses he/him nor she/her and you always have to refer to them by their name.
It's not though. Singular they goes back to middle English (14th century) it was just grammar Nazis in the 18th century that tried to stamp it out.
one always thinks of a plurality of people
Speak for yourself! I don't immediately think plural when "they" is used.
Using "one" yet it refers to multiple people, my days.
IMO only one person is allowed to use the one pronoun: Keanu Reeves
Person 1: Is your friend Bob coming over? Person 2: No, they can't make it, they're busy
One Bob, and we all know it's one Bob, no confusion. Look for context. It's not that hard.
One does not (always) do this. The singular "they" is many hundreds of years old.
If it confuses you, then I understand your confusion. Please read about the history of the singular "they" in order to resolve your confusion.
https://www.oed.com/discover/a-brief-history-of-singular-they
Why not choose new words? Languages evolve in a complex way. One reason is that "they" is an easy choice. Another reason is that many speakers react harshly to unfamiliar pronouns, therefore it promotes acceptance to use familiar pronouns in new ways. I wrote with the Spivak pronouns for years, but that led to more distraction than understanding, so when "they" emerged as a standard, I adopted it.
Really? I used they when I wasn't sure of gender (online games for example) before the pronoun use became common. I cannot remember anyone ever being confused.
Conservatives would probably get mad about that too so "they" works just fine
Me talking at dinner: "Will you pass me the peas?" Cut to 5 people confused about whether I mean just one of them or if I want the whole table to all hand me the peas.
I get why they/them can be confusing because of the plural thing, but we are used to a quirky language. With a little practice, the tone and context clear up nearly all confusion. The rest is as easy or hard as what we have to do with an ambiguous "you."
PS Sorry to the "yous/yous guys" people. I am not trying to turn a blind eye to you obviously superior usage. It just really ruins my point.
You say "with a little practice," but there's no practice needed when it's already part of our language. I guarantee every English speaker complaining about it uses "they" as a singular pronoun quite often.
If you don’t know someone’s gender, what do you call them? Like, what if they present in a really ambiguous way? Or what if you’ve never even met them? Like say you’re about to sit down at a restaurant, and you notice a jacket on the seat, would you tell the hostess, “excuse me, I think the last person to sit here left their jacket.” Or would you just be unable to refer to them because you don’t know their gender?
Sadly, many educational institutions still teach a prescriptive form of English that fails to acknowledge this, but singular "They" is decades older than using "You" instead of "Thou" as a singular second-person pronoun. It was already in common use way back in Shakespeare's time. If thou thinkst this confusing, change thyself before demanding others change for thine own comfort.
Also, some people are plural, so the ambiguity of "they" is inclusive to them.
Also-also, the only other pronouns in common use that aren't explicitly gendered are "it/its", which some people find dehumanizing. Nonbinary and agender folks often (but not exclusively) prefer "they/them" over "it/its" or neopronouns.
Also-also-also, "picking new words to use" is extremely non-trivial for pronouns because it requires the entire English-speaking population to relearn fundamental communication habits. It's much easier to simply accept the fact that singular they is extremely common.
Thou shouldst campaign for the resurgence of a second person singular pronoun as well.
confusing and difficult
It's really not, if you try. Have you tried? No. So give it an earnest shot before you lament your woes and push for others to bend over backward for you.
This is typical for the English language.
There used to be thou, which was a singular form of you. However, thou also implied you were talking to someone at or lower that you were. Eventually, it became seen as rude to call someone thou, so its usage dropped in favor of a uniform you.
A singular they fits this role, as the gender isn't defined enough to use he or she and the use of it would be seen as an insult.
It is much quicker to understand they as a neutral instead of introducing new language and trying to disseminate that through textbooks. This way, there's no need for any (or many) edits, we can just maintain existing grammar with new understanding.
English already has another form which refers to singular and plural: 'you'. I assume that people who suddenly take umbrage are just kicking up a fuss for the sake of it, or simply didn't stop to think about what they've been using all this time.
why use many word when few word do trick?
Good grief, this is not new. It's part of the English language. They/them has always been around to use when one couldn't, or didn't want to use a more specific pronoun. Cumbersome, maybe, but much language is. It is NOT a big deal.
Entering academia early 2000s, I saw people refer to authors of research papers as "they" as a default to sidestep gendering.
On one hand it's nice to not insert gender where it isn't needed, but on the more practical hand it wasn't always possible to tell by name either. European names can have different gender in different regions, or be all Sztrkökla, and names from Asia are even harder to guess.
names from Asia are even harder to guess
Good luck in Cambodia where Samnang and many other names can be used for both male and female names.
You get gender-neutral names in English-speaking countries too, eg Alex, Jordan, and Dylan. It's just not possible to reliably guess everyone's gender from their name alone.
In Norway there's like 60 names that have a reasonably even usage between genders.
I totally get your opinion, because I used to share it and even created a similar post on Reddit a few years ago. Just start using it and you'll be surprised how quickly it becomes natural. There's no good reason not to do something that is easy and can potentially prevent people from feeling uncomfortable.
We don't need a new word. "Dude" already exists.
I'm a dude.
He's a dude.
She's a dude.
We're all dudes!