He said, she said

Which default pronoun do you prefer?

  • He

    Votes: 62 72.9%
  • She

    Votes: 23 27.1%

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"He" for one reason only: One less character taking up space. I would prefere "it" as those are 2 half-space characters.

Sorry for thinking like a typesetter, but I've been in the newspaper industry for over a decade now.
 

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I love how the proponents of the gender-neutral "he" are claiming that it's "proper English" and absolutely nothing else is.

There is no consensus on this subject across all the style guides, dictionaries, and fields of academic inquiry related to English such as grammer, linguistics, semantics, et cetera, so any claim that it's "proper" is false on the face of it.

Forget what you were taught in high school or even college a decade or two ago, because if you were taught that "he" is the only acceptable gender-neutral pronoun you were taught a lie, even back then.
 

Thunderfoot said:
I have to say, I can't tell how many posters are seriously ignorant of proper English

I guess I'm seriously ignorant, because when I read the poll, I don't read the question as "what is the correct usage of the gender neutral form".

But then again, English isn't my first language. YMMV.

/M
 

mhacdebhandia said:
I love how the proponents of the gender-neutral "he" are claiming that it's "proper English" and absolutely nothing else is.

There is no consensus on this subject across all the style guides, dictionaries, and fields of academic inquiry related to English such as grammer, linguistics, semantics, et cetera, so any claim that it's "proper" is false on the face of it.

Forget what you were taught in high school or even college a decade or two ago, because if you were taught that "he" is the only acceptable gender-neutral pronoun you were taught a lie, even back then.
Of course, the lack of consensus is also possibly due to the extreme political bias and bizarre mindset that completely dominates the academic circles which are supposed to cover this topic. As someone who has recently graduated as an English major from college, it is my experience that many English professors (the people who write these guides) are fairly well detatched from reality when it comes to things like this, preferring political motivations and academic schools of thought born in 1960's-1970's college hippie movements over more objective methods of study.

Besides, the only real alternatives to "he" or alternating between "he" and "she" are "it" and "they". Neither "it" nor "they" work well at all. From all the different places where I have actually seen a writer try to use "they" (mostly when trying to translate languages like Japanese, where there arn't even pronouns, and gender can be hard to identify), it always sounds clunky and reads like a deliberate attempt to artificially obscure gender. I don't even want to imagine someone conjugating it properly and using the phrase "they is". There are much better ways to achieve that objective. "It" doesn't work because it is only permissible for describing inanimate objects.

Also, Shakespeare, brillaint and fun as he was, was a writer several hundred years ago. English has changed since then, so he is not a good guideline... Unless you want to argue for the mass revival of the pronoun "thou" as well.
 
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Why not? It would be fun to distinguish between formal and intimate address.

Look, to be honest, a big part of the reason why I feel this way is because I think it is absolutely, incontravertibly true that the use of "he" as the "neuter" pronoun is an example of masculinity being enshrined as the normative mode of human existence, and I can't imagine how someone might be aware of this and not consider it a good idea to consciously change our habits so as to eliminate that sexist phenomenon.

In other words, it's not a coincidence that our supposedly-proper neuter pronoun is exactly the same as our proper masculine pronoun, and given that the very way we think is affected by the language we use I can't imagine a good reason for preserving it.

But, of course, I'm also the sort of person who gets frustrated when people dismiss an argument as "just semantics", because semantics is the study of meaning, and dismissing the idea that what words actually mean is important just boggles my mind.

I use "they" quite often as a singular pronoun (and "they is" would still not be correct), but there's a simple solution: stop using singular examples. Instead of "a wizard requires 8 hours of rest before he can prepare his spells", write "wizards require 8 hours of rest before they can prepare their spells". If you have to use a singular example, such as a fight between a single fighter and an orc, use specific named characters and alternate the genders (this works whether you use iconics or not) - so it's not "the fighter charges his opponent", it's "Regdar charges his opponent" or "Alhandra calls upon the favour of her god and smites the orc".
 

Everyone knows that the soul of DnD is randomness in everything, and so it should be applied to pronoun use. Each instance of a gender based pronoun should have a random chance of either (or more if you throw in it as well) pronoun, even if that results in incompatible pronouns. :)
 



shadow said:
I suppose one solution is to print all the books in Esperanto! :p It has a gender neutral pronoun 'ĝi'. Of course, we'd all have to learn a second language to read our new rule books!

Would serve you right. We had to for a long time now (well, not exactly "had to". There's awlays the choice of using the translated books, which took forever to be released, if they were released at all, and were a crime against both languages involved).
 

Dr. Awkward said:
Can you imagine what the reaction would be if they started saying things like "When man gains a new level, man chooses a new bonus feat." That would be totally awesome, just because it sounds like pidgin-Tarzan-caveman English.

Wouldn't work, because people would insist that we alternate between man and woman :p

Maybe we switch things around. In Germany, we use man for the neutral instead of "Mann", so English should use mann instead of man. :D
 

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