On Saturday, 13 June 2015 at 01:09:48 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
On 6/13/2015 3:32 AM, Tofu Ninja wrote:
Not to me. Gender-neutrality is for the cases when the gender
is unknown or the subject is generic, e.g. "A person". I would
assume that you are likely to know the gender of a friend, in
which case 'they' makes no sense here.
When I used to play Dark Age of Camelot, there was one line of
text that annoyed me to no end. Anytime someone summoned their
horse, you would see a message like this:
"Dougal mounts their horse."
Wrong, wrong, wrong!
Actually I think it matters more if the person you are talking to
knows the gender of the person you are talking about, in the shop
sentence the gender of the friend is unknown to the person you
are talking to so "they" still works.
I suppose the Dark Age of Camelot line doesn't make sense because
you as the listener know the gender of Dougal, though honestly it
still sounds fine to me because I am not really sure if Dougal is
supposed to be male or female.
