Thunderfoot said:I have to say, I can't tell how many posters are seriously ignorant of proper English
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.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.
Victim said:Everyone knows that the soul of DnD is randomness in everything
Thunderfoot said:there are no gender neutral pronouns for living beings in the English language, nor should there be
shadow said:I suppose one solution is to print all the books in Esperanto!It has a gender neutral pronoun 'ĝi'. Of course, we'd all have to learn a second language to read our new rule books!
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.