[cdumler]

Being an old, grey beard, it's been interesting to see language change in my lifetime. Things I learned:

  * Third-person singular indefinite ("he or she") can be replaced with third-person plural ("they").  Of course, a lot of changes around recognizing gender.
  * Final punctuation within the quote at the end of sentence (Did you just say "what?") can be placed after the final quote if the quote is for a literal string (ie, The password is "123456".)
  * Companies switched from being singular plurals ("Google is deprecating another product.") to plural singulars ("Google are deprecating another product.")
  * Moving away from verbed nouns ("Google it") to multipart verbs ("search it up").
  * Double infinitives ("to try to eat") getting changed to an infinitive and conjunction ("to try and eat").

One thing I am very said about is just how lack luster both of my kid's hand writing is. My eldest is in high-school and her hand writing is horrible. Partly because she has little use for long-form writing (forget cursive) and because they rely on the spell checker.

[jasonpeacock]

Singular "they" has been around for a very long time, and used naturally without anyone noticing it as unusual, until recently when there's been more gender discussion and people suddenly realizing they were already recognizing genderless people without knowing it ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

[nmeofthestate]

You're right - that has been around for a long long time. But I feel like I've seen a general increase in its usage that can make writing more ambiguous to parse. Like we already know the gender of someone being written about in a sentence, but they become referred to as "they" at random - it's a subtle effect. I'm talking about examples unrelated to "gender stuff" but perhaps that's what's made the usage more popular among younger writers.

[DonHopkins]

Maybe young (and/or non-sexist) writers just don't care or aren't obsessed with knowing and explicitly talking about someone's gender, when it has nothing to do with the message.

[int_19h]

I just find it annoying that English is almost entirely gender neutral except for pronouns. It feels like a weird and unnecessary special case (I really don't need to be telling everyone what I believe their gender to be every time I address them!), so getting rid of that makes the language more consistent and uniform overall.

I just wish it didn't conflate singular and plural. But the convenience of broadening an existing pattern rather than inventing a completely new one still wins in the end.

[DonHopkins]

German seems even more obsessed with gender than English, and the exceptions (der Junge -vs- das Mädchen) seem to reveal its underlying assumptions and disrespect for reality in the ways it doesn't align with natural or biological gender, like refusing to assign gender to young females while imposing manhood on young boys, and bizarrely insisting on assigning arbitrary gender to inanimate objects.

Gendered pronouns and nouns are just a bunch of useless sexist baggage and linguistic friction that make languages much harder to learn, and uselessly complex, with more trivial arbitrary details to memorize or get wrong.

But all those gender-critical sex-obsessed people who make a big deal out of getting performatively offended and pretending to be confused by neutral pronouns, angrily insisting that every word possible explicitly defines a gender, are just weird.

The person doth protest too much, methinks.

[int_19h]

German has grammatic gender for all nouns, so it is consistent in that regard, at least. I also don't like novel ungendered forms for languages like Spanish ("latinx" etc) for the same reason - they stick out like a sore thumb because they don't fit the overall feel of the language where gender is already a pervasive concept. It's kinda like taking a statically typed language and introducing completely new syntax to omit the type in one very specific case, but not all the others.

But English nouns are already ungendered with very few exceptions. Pronouns are also all ungendered except third person singular, so there's a much stronger case here for eliminating the exception in contexts where it really doesn't contribute anything useful.

As far as getting offended, I think one has to distinguish between the person getting misgendered being offended themselves vs people getting offended "on behalf" of others (who might actually be rather offended at such misrepresentation of what they actually want). E.g. with Spanish it's far more common for native English speakers to be adamant about "-x", while many native Spanish speakers actively dislike it.

[nmeofthestate]

Good point - maybe you're right and just I'm a gender-obsessed sexist. Thanks.

[fennecfoxy]

Tbf so many instances they don't use "they" but "he or she"...where my thinking is, not only is it more inclusive but it's actually easier to just use "they"?

[cubefox]

> and people suddenly realizing they were already recognizing genderless people without knowing it ;)

They weren't recognizing genderless people just because they used "they" when the gender was unknown ;)

[jasonpeacock]

Yes, you're correct. I think I was trying to find a succinct way to say "everyone was happily using 'they' without concern until gendering became a hot topic and suddenly they noticed their usage of 'they' and didn't like that it was already an acceptable and in-use solution for including genderless people" or something like that :)

[xdennis]

> people suddenly realizing they were already recognizing genderless people without knowing it ;)

Not true. It was used in the past to refer to an unknown person. I.e. "When a candidate arrives given them the test." You don't know what sex the candidate is before he arrives and instead of saying "he or she" you say "they".

But nowadays people use it as a superclass of he and she: "I asked my boss for a raise but they refused". It doesn't make any sense. You know very well what sex your boss is, but "they" is used for virtue signaling. It's a way of saying "I know my boss is a man, but I'm going to use they because a woman could do just a good a job and he, sorry, they does."

[kayodelycaon]

> You know very well what sex your boss is, but "they" is used for virtue signaling.

I doubt it's virtue signaling. I'll use they to refer to the position not the person. Sometimes it's deliberate obscuration. Other times it's a form of laziness. I don't have to think about which pronoun to use if I just use the generic one.

In my case, once I got used to seeing people as people first instead of their gender, it's been easy to slip up on the pronoun.

[jasonpeacock]

Your sentence is the perfect example for proper use of "they", per the wikipedia article "It typically occurs with an indeterminate antecedent" - "boss" is non-gendered and so "they" is grammatically correct.

There's no virtue signalling, you're reading too much into it.

[DonHopkins]

No, it is used to signal the person's gender doesn't matter. Being angry about other people not fixating on gender by demanding everyone always explicitly define it with every pronoun is used as sexism signaling, which is what you're doing.

You don't know why other people choose to use the words they do, yet you presume the worst and accuse people of being insincere and lacking virtue despite (and because of) their polite behavior, regardless of their true beliefs, when it's actually none of your business to police and judge their grammar.

I'd rather work with someone who purposefully signals they have virtue than someone who purposefully signals they're a sexist asshole, any day.

[carlosjobim]

What a comment...

The person you responded to is right. If you start mixing in "they" you're just confusing the listener, because they will assume you're now talking about some different people. I wouldn't have the patience to listen to somebody who speaks in that matter and deliberately makes their words cryptic.

[DonHopkins]

Sexist assholes who become performatively confused and impatient and pretend they can't understand you and stop listening are just signaling that they are sexist assholes.

[carlosjobim]

Do you think anybody at all wants to listen to you if you speak in this way?

[int_19h]

I do know what sex my boss is, but why should I be forced to restate it every time I reference them in a conversation? It feels rather less polite to the speaker to impose that need on them.

[zargon]

> Companies switched from being singular plurals ("Google is deprecating another product.") to plural singulars ("Google are deprecating another product.")

I thought this was just a difference between American and British English.

[emaro]

It's the first time I see a company's name used like that.

[ldoughty]

Being an old grey beard you probably know these... but for others:

> * Final punctuation within the quote at the end of sentence (Did you just say "what?") can be placed after the final quote if the quote is for a literal string (ie, The password is "123456".)

Prior to movable type printing presses, the British "logical quotation" system was the norm for English.

This changed, and is credited to american newspapers, because of movable type. I've heard different reasoning (from being less likely to break, or to looking cleaner), but both point to printers. Even the alternate name for this quotation style is "typesetters quotation." <== the period inside the quote to end that sentence!

Being a form of mass media, this meant that a lot of mass produced works now 'promoted' by proxy this typesetters quotation style.

Source for some more info on the above: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_marks_in_English

> * Moving away from verbed nouns ("Google it") to multipart verbs ("search it up").

This is purely branding. In the US, if people say "Google it", it creates a synonym between "Google" and "Search", which hurts cases for Google in defending their brand... If it gets too weak, then you or I could make a "Google Booster" company, which focuses on improving search engine rankings in general -- not just Google, and with no direct business relation with Google

See: Kleenex, Band-aid, ChapStick, Crock-pot, Jacuzzi

[mostlysimilar]

> * Companies switched from being singular plurals ("Google is deprecating another product.") to plural singulars ("Google are deprecating another product.")

> * Moving away from verbed nouns ("Google it") to multipart verbs ("search it up").

Resist! Google is trying to get you to stop Googling things, but we don't have to listen to the corporate overlords.

[nmeofthestate]

I think organisations (companies, teams) being singular/plural differs depending on what country you're in, so perhaps this is a bleeding across of conventions due to globalisation.

[OJFord]

> Double infinitives ("to try to eat") getting changed to an infinitive and conjunction ("to try and eat").

Or worse, 'to try eat', 'to go get', etc.

It's very American to my ear, but it's certainly invading.

Another corruption triple like that is to do something 'accidentally' / 'by accident' / 'on accident'.

[int_19h]

"go" + verb is a specific idiom, but I can't say that "try eat" is common or widely accepted as correct in American English.

[unsupp0rted]

I bet her calligraphy sucks too. And is she any good at milking a cow?

In 2024 there's no need to feel sad about deprecated (or now niche) skills being lackluster.

I'd be more concerned if she couldn't find information efficiently when she goes searching for it. That's a skill that mustn't be lackluster.

[cubefox]

> * Companies switched from being singular plurals ("Google is deprecating another product.") to plural singulars ("Google are deprecating another product.")

I think that's just a grammatical error that people (sometimes) make, and it isn't even specific to English.

[ghayes]

Is “search it up” much different from a similar phrase “search for it”? The structure of the original quote is “imperative verb, direct object, adverb” but I wouldn’t call that a change in grammar so much as a change in diction.

[layer8]

It’s adapted from “look it up”. Or maybe more specifically, it’s “look it up using internet search”.

[talideon]

Your "plural singulars" have been the normal way of doing things in much of the Anglosphere outside of North America for quite some time.