Conference thebay::joyoflex

    There is such an invented word, the indeclinable "ir."
    
    	The Manager of the shop has to cash up at the end of day.  Ir
    	also has to record the cash tally in the log book.
    
    Or perhaps...
    
    	Ir told ir that ir hair was ugly.
    
    Some people will go incredible lengths to be politically correct.  In
    the Curmudgeon's Dictionary, I find the following reactionary view:
    
        -person, n.  A suffix sometimes substituted for `man' in words such
        as `chairman' and `draftsman' as a sop to certain weak-minded
        feminists who, having little or no self-assurance, require
        continual reminders that they are not members of the race of Man. 
        Also used as a prefix, often with results disastrous to
        communication: e.g., personhood for manhood.
        
    -dick

I refuse to use "he or she" or any of the other nonsense that's supposed
to be PC.  If I want to avoid offending people who are upset by this
kind of stuff, I rephrase it, e.g.

    	The Manager of the shop has to cash up at the end of day and
    	record the cash tally in the log book.

>>I refuse to use "he or she" or any of the other nonsense that's supposed
>>to be PC.  If I want to avoid offending people who are upset by this
>>kind of stuff, I rephrase it, e.g.

	Hear, hear.  It's ridiculous.

    
    Jon,
    
    I direct your attention to topic 147. Some have argued that the word
    you are looking for is "they."
    
    JP

    The construction  s/he  has been used by some midrange people
    (i.e. slightly more respectable than PC :-)
    
    It has also been suggested that a single acronym should be formed
    from all three third-person singulars, she, he, and it.

    re: .1 and indeclinable "ir".
    
    	It is usually spelt "er", but
    'Er told 'er that 'er 'air was ugly.
    is normal Devon dialect, and the "'er" is undoubtably feminine gender.
    The corresponding "'e" (masculine) has only a genitive.
    'E told 'e that 'is 'air was ugly.
    
    	There is also "un" which is used in a similar way. Maybe that could
    be a candidate. I will check with my wife.

    OK - let's examine the evidence for the prosecution:
    
    re: .1
    
    Thank you for the information about`ir'.  I have not come across this
    invention before - whence came it? (or should that be they?)
    
    re: .2
    
    Ah, but simply conjoining the sentence has limits.  What if I had a
    fourteen line paragraph with 11 sentences.  Would you join them all
    together?  Would you join some and repeat `The Manager' at the
    beginning of each of the remaining longer sentences?  Isn't it easier
    to have a pronoun (perhaps `ir')?
    
    re: .4
    
    Thanks.  I have looked at 147.2, 147.5, 155.0, 155.3 and remain
    unconvinced.  Each of the examples seems to relate to an impersonal
    noun (each, nobody, somebody).  I still feel the need for a more
    personal but genderless pronoun which is specifically singular. 
    Perhaps this speaks more of my grammatical pedantry than anything else.
    
    re: several
    
    This is not sought through political correctness, but rather in an
    effort to construct less clumsy sentences without being offensive.
    
    Jon

    I either write around it or I use she/her/hers for the neutral.  I've
    been doing this since about 1971 and that unexpected female actor
    really hits you in the eye.
    
    When I mentioned this to Frank McGowan, he said he did the same thing: 
    "400 years of he/him/his followed by 400 years of she/her/hers and then
    we can straighten it out."
    
    Using they is cool too.
    

    Re .7
    
    > This is not sought through political correctness, but rather in an
    > effort to construct less clumsy sentences without being offensive.
    
    Being not offensive is the entire essence of political correctness.
    
    Reis aliis
    
    Using "they/their/them" is not cool.  "They/their/them" is the
    third-person PLURAL set of pronouns.  I have *some* standards yet; I
    will not adopt the ungrammatical usages of others simply as an escape
    from being PI.  Long before I will descend to such obviously incorrect
    mixing of number, I will work with "he or she" or other variants, or I
    will recast the sentence to avoid the pronoun.
    
    -dick

    Just declare that "he" and "him", etc., _are_ the genderless pronouns,
    then make up new ones to replace them (if you still think it necessary).
    In one fell swoop, all existing references to "he" become gender-neutral,
    and you won't have to modify any speech or writing habits.
    
    -piper

    "One" in formal dress, "you" in casual wear.
    
    "They", "their", and "them" are cool in my book, and a lot of others
    published from the Renaissance through the 20th century.  Your tough
    luck if the one book you use to write by disagrees.
    
    I'm also fond of using "she" and "her" since my idealized fuzzy shadow
    reader out there looks vaguely feminine.  But for the most part I go
    with the vaguely moblike fuzzy shadow of "them".
    
    Ray

    I don't condone this but Damon Knight always uses "yeye".  Personally I
    find that a little too bright and bouncy for a pronoun.  Pronouns
    should be drab gray or khaki so that one can deal with them before
    one's morning coffee.
    
    Rayay

re .7:

>    Ah, but simply conjoining the sentence has limits.

Indeed.  I said I'd rephrase.  In your example, conjoining worked fine.
In other examples, I'd do it another way.

    Re: .10 "declaring he and him neutral"
    
    This is the situation that currently obtains, but many feel that
    neutrality is not being genuinely maintained.
    

    In fact, in a note in this conference, someone already posted
    Douglas Hofstadter's article sarcastically declaring "white"
    to be neutral (in words such as chairwhite, whitekind, etc.).
    And someone else already didn't get the point.....
    
    -- Norman Diamond

I seem to recall this having been discussed in some other note in this
conference (beside 147 and 155) - but I don't have the patience to go
looking...

My recollection is that "cos" was suggested by someone as an alternative.  Is
this familiar to anyone here?

Also, I believe that one can take the use of "you" as a 2nd person singular
pronoun to be a precedent for using "they" for the 3rd person singular.  That
is, isn't it true that "you" was originally reserved for plural usage,
whereas "thou" was the singular form?

Bill

    G'day,
    
    
    We are looking for a 'he/she' replacement. Since 'he' is not 'she',
    this implies that there are more persons than one (from which one will
    be selected) who are elegible for inclusion, and hence 'he/she' is
    plural. 'They' and 'their' are therefore acceptable.
    
    
    
    The Manager ..... . They should ensure a balance in their accounts....
    
    
    derek
    

    Re .16
    
    >Also, I believe that one can take the use of "you" as a 2nd person singular
    >pronoun to be a precedent for using "they" for the 3rd person singular.
    
    We agree with you.

    re .18
    
    Well now, you may agree with them but is they right?   ;-)
    
    Jon

    Fowler declares that the use of "they" for a single person is
    unacceptable to grammarians despite its hoary history.
    
    I think that people who are reluctant to stand up to the PC movement
    and use singular pronouns are chicken, and hence the use of the plural
    in loco singularis is fowl.

    Well, I wish that there were such a pronoun, and my wish has *nothing* 
    to do with the PC movement.  I found myself wishing for such a thing
    when I was a technical writer, *decades* ago.  It was commonplace in
    that particular company to refer to programmers, managers, or engineers
    as "he" but clerks, tellers, secretaries as "she".  This sort of thing
    makes one suspect that the "he" doesn't include the idea of "she" in
    most people's minds.   
    
    But, of course, the language can never change because grammarians don't
    like change.  8^)  But grammarians eventually die; the language goes
    on.
    
    -ellie

    For technical writing, you have two easy alternatives.  Address the
    text to the second person, or use nouns:
    
    	"It is a good idea to include comments in your shell scripts. 
    	Comments help you remember what the script does and how to use
    	it..."
    
    			- The Big Gray Book: The Next Step with ULTRIX
    
    	"MAIL
    	   If this parameter is set to the name of a mail file and the MAIL-
    	   PATH parameter is not set, the shell informs the user of the
    	   arrival of mail in the specified file."
    
    			- sh5(1) manpage
    
    There's always a way, and usually it can even be written to appear
    reasonably graceful.
    
    -dick

    Yes, you are right that things can be rewritten, and in the instances
    you give, there's not a lot of difficulty.  It is bit more cumbersome
    in other instances.  The case I had in mind was a requirements
    description in which phrases like "the teller/clerk/secretary will do 
    <foo> and then she will do <foo>.
    
    But how to rewrite it wasn't the point.  The point is that there is
    evidence that this change was happening "in the field" before the PC 
    people came up with the idea.  I admit it's not a graceful
    construction.  Since we learned the words "they" and "them" only as
    plural forms, it is jarring to have them used as singular pronouns.  But 
    it may well happen that these words will come to have both senses, like 
    "you" as time goes by.  If this extra meaning becomes common, I think 
    the construction could become standard, because then it will not have 
    the contradiction in number that's so jarring now.
    
    -ellie

    If "they" is to become the default impersonal pronoun, it will,
    regardless of what the "PC" folks say.  Usage determines the
    evolution of language; very little else has any impact whatsoever.
    
    					andrew

    >If "they" is to become the default impersonal pronoun, it will,
    
    Don't you mean this:
     If "they" are to become the default impersonal pronoun, they will...
    
    Fowler are obsolete.

    What's wrong with "one" then?  "One" is a time-honored form without
    gender, and it (or its sense) appears in languages other than English.
    French, for example, has "on" which means the same things:
    
    On dit qu'il pleut.		"They" say it's raining.
    On ne fait pas �a.		"One" does not do that.	
    
    W9NCD includes "one" as "a member of a vaguely defined group: anyone at
    all," and Fowler specifically refers to it as an "indefinite, or
    impersonal, pronoun."
    
    -dick

"One" sounds stuffy, at least to Americans.  It's the lingo of etiquette
authorities.

>>"One" sounds stuffy, at least to Americans.  It's the lingo of etiquette
>>authorities.

	Please, make that _some_ Americans.


        Dick, I had thought of "one" too, but it seems better suited as a
	substitute for the first or second person than for the third.
	In the example given in .0, one would still have to rephrase
	in order to use "one", I believe.
    
    	>>The Manager of the shop has to cash up at the end of day.  It
    	>>also has to record the cash tally in the log book.
    
	It wouldn't sound right to say "One also has to..." in this
	case.  It could be worded "As manager of the shop, one has to
	cash up at the end of the day and record the cash tally in 
	the log book.", but I thought the base note author was after
	a true substitute.
    
	Diane

    Oh, good grief, Diane!  Using "one" for first or second person is a
    *real* bag of worms; the false first-personal "one" is so stuffy as to
    require Allerest:  "One just doesn't think the weather is suited to
    strolling today."
    
    Your example of "one" as a first- or second-person pronoun is weak,
    methinks:
    
    > In the example given in .0, one would still have to rephrase
    > in order to use "one", I believe.
    
    A perfectly valid interpretation for this is either "you would
    still..." or "the writer would still..."  The latter is more formal,
    less conversational; but it is clearly a third-person usage.  Can you
    provide an example that uses "one" in first or second person that is
    both not stuffy and unequivocal about person?
    
    -dick

    >>Oh, good grief, Diane!  Using "one" for first or second person is a
    >>*real* bag of worms
 
	Good grief?  Dick, you cut me to the quick. 8^) I didn't say it
	wasn't a bag of worms when used in the first or second person,
	I just said I didn't think it was well suited for use as a direct
	substitute for a third-person pronoun.

        It can sound stuffy, but it doesn't always.
    
    >>Your example of "one" as a first- or second-person pronoun is weak,
    >>methinks:
    
	I wasn't using it in that sentence as an example, surprisingly
	enough.  Merely a coincidence.

    >>Can you
    >>provide an example that uses "one" in first or second person that is
    >>both not stuffy and unequivocal about person?

	One would hope so.

    "One would hope so." --> "It is to be hoped."
    
    This usage is essentially the same as the example I gave:
    
    "Could one refuse?" --> "Was refusal to be exercised?"
    
    Semantically, both are impersonal, and hence third-person, usages.
    
    Next?  :-)

	Okay, Dick.  I'll be happy to acquiesce.  Let's say that
	it's _always_ used in the third person.  Fine.  Marvelous.  8^)

	However, that doesn't change the fact that it cannot be
	substituted for "he", "she", etc. in every situation
	without wordsmithing.  Will you at least grant that that
	is true?

    OK, Dick & Diane...
    
    Now that you've both had your say in this, of questions I have but one --
    
    Who one?
    
    :-)
    

    Dan,
    
    No one one.  Why do you oneder?
    
    -dick

    There's always Fats Waller's observation:
    
    	"One never knows, do one?"