Pronoun Removal

[rusty_shackleford]

But to my knowledge there has never been an agreed upon pronoun for a singular, definite person of unknown sex.

?
That would imply we don't have pronouns for things like animals of an unknown sex.

[1998]

https://nonbinary.wiki/wiki/Video_games ... er_options

[WhiteShark]

But to my knowledge there has never been an agreed upon pronoun for a singular, definite person of unknown sex.

?
That would imply we don't have pronouns for things like animals of an unknown sex.

I assume you're referring to my comment about animacy. Animacy in linguistics means something different from animacy in philosophy. It basically means the degree of sentience we recognize in an entity. Adult humans are fully animate, and so using it to refer to a human is considered a mistake; babies are less so, which is why you sometimes hear someone refer to a newborn as it; dogs are even less animate, but still animate enough that one prefers to use he or she if its sex is known; and insects have so little animacy that we tend to use it even when the sex is obvious.

Hence, it's acceptable in English to refer to an animal of unknown sex as it, but rude and unacceptable to call a specific adult human it.

[rusty_shackleford]

But to my knowledge there has never been an agreed upon pronoun for a singular, definite person of unknown sex.

?
That would imply we don't have pronouns for things like animals of an unknown sex.

I assume you're referring to my comment about animacy. Animacy in linguistics means something different from animacy in philosophy. It basically means the degree of sentience we recognize in an entity. Adult humans are fully animate, and so using it to refer to a human is considered a mistake; babies are less so, which is why you sometimes hear someone refer to a newborn as it; dogs are even less animate, but still animate enough that one prefers to use he or she if its sex is known; and insects have so little animacy that we tend to use it even when the sex is obvious.

Hence, it's acceptable in English to refer to an animal of unknown sex as it, but rude and unacceptable to call a specific adult human it.

…no.

You've never said something like "he bit me!" if a dog nipped you, despite not knowing if the dog is a male?

[WhiteShark]

You've never said something like "he bit me!" if a dog nipped you, despite not knowing if the dog is a male?

No. My instinct would be to use it, and if I imagined the same with a spider, I would certainly say it.

[Vergil]

Hence, it's acceptable in English to refer to an animal of unknown sex as it, but rude and unacceptable to call a specific adult human it.

I thought about using "it" but that seems wrong for what is meant to be a sentient character and wouldn't fit with the other non-human bosses that use he/she.

[Magick]

But to my knowledge there has never been an agreed upon pronoun for a singular, definite person of unknown sex.

?
That would imply we don't have pronouns for things like animals of an unknown sex.

I assume you're referring to my comment about animacy. Animacy in linguistics means something different from animacy in philosophy. It basically means the degree of sentience we recognize in an entity. Adult humans are fully animate, and so using it to refer to a human is considered a mistake; babies are less so, which is why you sometimes hear someone refer to a newborn as it; dogs are even less animate, but still animate enough that one prefers to use he or she if its sex is known; and insects have so little animacy that we tend to use it even when the sex is obvious.

Hence, it's acceptable in English to refer to an animal of unknown sex as it, but rude and unacceptable to call a specific adult human it.

I think "it" is fine when it's something monstrous, deformed or abnormal. I think that also works for a human that's so ******* mental it wears a pig head, if it acts in a way that it has lots its humanity.
But when the name is known (but the gender isn't, specifically), just use the name, Goreswine.

Anything is better than they/them BS in this context.

[WhiteShark]

But when the name is known (but the gender isn't, specifically), just use the name.

I thought about that solution, but reviewing the passage, the amount of repetition would quickly become awkward.

Anything is better than they/them BS in this context.

Agreed.

[Vergil]

Anything is better than they/them BS in this context.

The issue I'm having is I've heard "they" used to refer to people all my life outside of any modern gender autism. I don't know if that's just a southern thing though. I don't see anything that's implying this character is meant to be "non-binary" or anything like that just ambiguous and unknown.
Similar to news reports where the suspect is referred to as a "they" when their sex is completely obscured and unknown.

[rusty_shackleford]

You've never said something like "he bit me!" if a dog nipped you, despite not knowing if the dog is a male?

No. My instinct would be to use it, and if I imagined the same with a spider, I would certainly say it.

The word "dog" itself is masculine, yes, English does have the concept of grammatical gender — it's just restricted to certain noun classes. Why do you think people say "good boy" when referring to a dog of an unknown gender?



If you want to see a better example of this in action, the 'doge' dog recently died — the dog itself was female, and yet was widely referred to as a male in responses.

[WhiteShark]

Anything is better than they/them BS in this context.

The issue I'm having is I've heard "they" used to refer to people all my life outside of any modern gender autism. I don't know if that's just a southern thing though. I don't see anything that's implying this character is meant to be "non-binary" or anything like that just ambiguous and unknown.
Similar to news reports where the suspect is referred to as a "they" when their sex is completely obscured and unknown.

It's popularity has been growing for decades, so the younger you are and the fewer older writings you've read, the more normal it will seem. I think it's inevitable that one pronoun or another will come to fill this hole in English grammar, and the way the wind is blowing, it probably will be they, but I'll still resist it to the bitter end. I would rather it were he, in keeping with its use as the generic pronoun for indefinite persons.

@rusty_shackleford, example of the KJV using it for an animal of unknown sex:

12:20 [...] And if so much as a beast touch the mountain, it shall be stoned, or thrust through with a dart:

[WhiteShark]

The word "dog" itself is masculine, yes, English does have the concept of grammatical gender — it's just restricted to certain noun classes.

Grammatical gender has been dead in English for centuries.

Why do you think people say "good boy" when referring to a dog of an unknown gender?

Because there is no neutral equivalent that doesn't sound overly formal or as though it should refer to a human, e.g. child.

[Oyster Sauce]

Why do you think people say "good boy" when referring to a dog of an unknown gender?

Because there is no neutral equivalent that doesn't sound overly formal or as though it should refer to a human, e.g. child.

Uh are you forgetting pupperino and heckin' doggo?

[rusty_shackleford]

Grammatical gender has been dead in English for centuries.

If you want to be pedantic about it, sure. It's semantic gender.

[Vergil]

I checked the French localization and it uses masculine pronouns so that's the final deciding factor for me I'll update the mod in a moment.

[rusty_shackleford]

Today I learned @Oyster Sauce is a zoomer.

[Oyster Sauce]

Today I learned @Oyster Sauce is a zoomer.

Not when I started an alternative Adventurer's Guild for more accessible RPGs?

[rusty_shackleford]

Going to have to force my janitors to fight to the death to see who is the strongest zoomer.

[WhiteShark]

Going to have to force my janitors to fight to the death to see who is the strongest zoomer.

Today I learned @Nemesis is a zoomer.

[Vergil]

Mod has been updated. Making the thumbnail took more work than the mod.
viewtopic.php?p=103724-v-rising-woke-ma ... ng#p103724

[Oyster Sauce]

Added Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War which took me by surprise

[Oyster Sauce]

Added Fields of Mistria

[loregamer]

Runescape will need a mod apparently

[Tweed]

"We won."

Yeah you won alright. You won the chance to seethe eternally at all the websites you can't police hosting pronoun mods you can never remove.

[UltraFan123]

For a second I almost allowed myself to say "the freaks have had too many loses as of late so perhaps they can at least believe they had a small little win this time even if it isn't a real win at all" but I immediately remembered that those things don't deserve even the most microscopic win, like at all.

[phlegmatic]

Anything is better than they/them BS in this context.

The issue I'm having is I've heard "they" used to refer to people all my life outside of any modern gender autism. I don't know if that's just a southern thing though. I don't see anything that's implying this character is meant to be "non-binary" or anything like that just ambiguous and unknown.
Similar to news reports where the suspect is referred to as a "they" when their sex is completely obscured and unknown.

As a little historical note, singular neuter 'they' for persons of unknown sex or cases where the speaker wished to conceal the sex of the subject of a sentence was and is grammatically and syntactically correct English. The only case against the singular 'they' in formal terms is based upon a rather preposterous set of arguments formulated by an autistic ****** a couple centuries ago (if memory serves) who desperately wanted to shoehorn English into being more like Latin.

That is both why most English speakers will instinctively use it that way, because that was the entire purpose of the term: to refer to persons of indistinct, unknown, or varied sex - the latter meaning a group of people of both sexes.

It's unfortunate that the axe wounds have misappropriated the term, but it's no better or worse than some man referring to itself as "she" just because it chopped off its penis and lost any right to the male pronoun.

Edit: angry little would-be grammar police need to read their Chaucer or Shakespeare before they try to make arguments about the purity of the English language online.

For a second I almost allowed myself to say "the freaks have had too many loses as of late so perhaps they can at least believe they had a small little win this time even if it isn't a real win at all" but I immediately remembered that those things don't deserve even the most microscopic win, like at all.

Yeah. That would, essentially, be like arguing that occasionally it would be fair if the cancer "won".

[logincrash]

Anything is better than they/them BS in this context.

The issue I'm having is I've heard "they" used to refer to people all my life outside of any modern gender autism. I don't know if that's just a southern thing though. I don't see anything that's implying this character is meant to be "non-binary" or anything like that just ambiguous and unknown.
Similar to news reports where the suspect is referred to as a "they" when their sex is completely obscured and unknown.

As a little historical note, singular neuter 'they' for persons of unknown sex or cases where the speaker wished to conceal the sex of the subject of a sentence was and is grammatically and syntactically correct English. The only case against the singular 'they' in formal terms is based upon a rather preposterous set of arguments formulated by an autistic ****** a couple centuries ago (if memory serves) who desperately wanted to shoehorn English into being more like Latin.

That is both why most English speakers will instinctively use it that way, because that was the entire purpose of the term: to refer to persons of indistinct, unknown, or varied sex - the latter meaning a group of people of both sexes.

It's unfortunate that the axe wounds have misappropriated the term, but it's no better or worse than some man referring to itself as "she" just because it chopped off its penis and lost any right to the male pronoun.

Edit: angry little would-be grammar police need to read their Chaucer or Shakespeare before they try to make arguments about the purity of the English language online.

For a second I almost allowed myself to say "the freaks have had too many loses as of late so perhaps they can at least believe they had a small little win this time even if it isn't a real win at all" but I immediately remembered that those things don't deserve even the most microscopic win, like at all.

Yeah. That would, essentially, be like arguing that occasionally it would be fair if the cancer "won".

Nah, the pronoun for a person of unknown gender defaults to "he" until proven otherwise.

[TKVNC]

The issue I'm having is I've heard "they" used to refer to people all my life outside of any modern gender autism. I don't know if that's just a southern thing though. I don't see anything that's implying this character is meant to be "non-binary" or anything like that just ambiguous and unknown.
Similar to news reports where the suspect is referred to as a "they" when their sex is completely obscured and unknown.

As a little historical note, singular neuter 'they' for persons of unknown sex or cases where the speaker wished to conceal the sex of the subject of a sentence was and is grammatically and syntactically correct English. The only case against the singular 'they' in formal terms is based upon a rather preposterous set of arguments formulated by an autistic ****** a couple centuries ago (if memory serves) who desperately wanted to shoehorn English into being more like Latin.

That is both why most English speakers will instinctively use it that way, because that was the entire purpose of the term: to refer to persons of indistinct, unknown, or varied sex - the latter meaning a group of people of both sexes.

It's unfortunate that the axe wounds have misappropriated the term, but it's no better or worse than some man referring to itself as "she" just because it chopped off its penis and lost any right to the male pronoun.

Edit: angry little would-be grammar police need to read their Chaucer or Shakespeare before they try to make arguments about the purity of the English language online.

For a second I almost allowed myself to say "the freaks have had too many loses as of late so perhaps they can at least believe they had a small little win this time even if it isn't a real win at all" but I immediately remembered that those things don't deserve even the most microscopic win, like at all.

Yeah. That would, essentially, be like arguing that occasionally it would be fair if the cancer "won".

Nah, the pronoun for a person of unknown gender defaults to "he" until proven otherwise.

Yes, the reason we don't use 'it' for unknown people is because we have logic, a female name can be assumed based on spelling / phonetics - and a human can ne judged male or female from a glance.

We have no need of 'it' for Humans.

[rusty_shackleford]

Singular they was used, but not in the way that it is being used now. They've even managed to trip up stylistic guides by getting them to endorse singular they not realizing what they were endorsing, which caused the organizations to walk it back.

I was using it for people of unknown gender in the 90s.

The singular indefinite they was used for a person of unknown gender for a very long time. Consider:
"Someone left their wallet."
If you knew that it was Whiteshark's wallet, you'd say: "WhiteShark left his wallet."
The modern nu-singular they is a definite they: "WhiteShark left their wallet."

The "akshually, singular they has always been used!" crowd is purposely conflating these two.


If you're having trouble understanding the difference, know that this is something that tripped up a bunch of style guides, and not even for pozzed reasons — chicago styleguide went back and suggested against using it in the 'modern' way after first recommending to do so.
https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qa ... q0018.html

---

The Builder, 1927, Volume 4

The person who lost their keys is specific, but not definite.
The reason you'd see "he/him" used in, for example, the AD&D PHB was because the reader is specific and definite. This is despite the author not knowing who the reader is, exactly. It is specific to the reader's context.

[DagothGeas5]

Singular they was used, but not in the way that it is being used now. They've even managed to trip up stylistic guides by getting them to endorse singular they not realizing what they were endorsing, which caused the organizations to walk it back.

I was using it for people of unknown gender in the 90s.

The singular indefinite they was used for a person of unknown gender for a very long time. Consider:
"Someone left their wallet."
If you knew that it was Whiteshark's wallet, you'd say: "WhiteShark left his wallet."
The modern nu-singular they is a definite they: "WhiteShark left their wallet."

The "akshually, singular they has always been used!" crowd is purposely conflating these two.


If you're having trouble understanding the difference, know that this is something that tripped up a bunch of style guides, and not even for pozzed reasons — chicago styleguide went back and suggested against using it in the 'modern' way after first recommending to do so.
https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qa ... q0018.html

---

The Builder, 1927, Volume 4

The person who lost their keys is specific, but not definite.
The reason you'd see "he/him" used in, for example, the AD&D PHB was because the reader is specific and definite. This is despite the author not knowing who the reader is, exactly. It is specific to the reader's context.

Something about D&D that I noticed, some books started to use "she" as the base instead of he at some point. Not sure when it started, but it is incredibly noticeable. If there is need of an example for more information, do let me know, I can search the texts that I have.