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by shaoonb 699 days ago
Using "he" as default is just as much of a political stance as using "they" as default. The fact that whoever rejected this PR thinks that pronouns are "political" gives me a pretty good guess as to their overall political leanings.
1 comments
OJFord 699 days ago
To me that depends on the context it's used in - if it's like:

> When a user visits a web page, he expects [...]

then yes, I'd even just say that's wrong, no opinion or politics about it.

However if it's:

> So once Alice has published the website, and Bob visits it in his browser, he expects [...]

and the PR is suggesting that actually we don't know how fictional Bob identifies... Then personally I just think that's tedious, the pronouns are helpful to disambiguate Alice & Bob in shorthand anyway, and that is bringing 'political' (ish? Societal?) views into it.

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ajdude 698 days ago
A sibling comment[1] provided the PR[2].

The change was to replace:

   To prevent this, remove `anon` from the `wheel` group and he will no longer be able to run `/bin/su`.
With

    To prevent this, remove `anon` from the `wheel` group and they will no longer be able to run `/bin/su`.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40956931

[2] https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814

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OJFord 698 days ago
Yeah that's clearly the first case I gave then, it's just wrong, it's not even about not liking 'woke' or 'PC gone mad' or whatever.

At least, that's what I was taught at a private school, in a Conservative-voting area, ~25 years ago.

(I've always disliked the 'unknown-she/her' for 'important' roles too, for the same reason: it's fighting wrong with opposite wrong. Matt Levine for example will write 'if you ask someone on the front desk I feel like she will tell you' - it's an abstract person, they will tell you. Grr. Anyway.)

In this particular case I might actually say 'it' anyway. But in general I think to native English speakers (because we don't gender most things) it's pretty clear it should be 'they' if the sentence is more mundane and bias-free, like 'find someone to ask for directions, and if they don't know [...]' - it's just weird if you substitute '(s)he doesn't' isn't it?

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