On 22 September 2015 at 14:09, Andrew Dunstan <and...@dunslane.net> wrote:
> You are fighting a losing battle. Think of they/them/their/theirs as being > indefinitely gendered third person singular pronouns, as well as being > third person plural pronouns. Yes it's a relatively new usage, but I don't > think its at all unreasonable (speaking as someone who has been known to > dislike some new usages and neologisms). It's not at all sloppy. On the > contrary, it's quite deliberate. It's just not quite traditional. > It _is_ sloppy. It says "I can't be bothered to write a sentence that's grammatically correct". > You need to get over that. > I don't need to get over anything. If someone sends me a document that uses "their" in a singular usage, I will think that person is lazy. That will continue to be the case, whether people tell me that it's accepted usage or not. In much the same way, I know that I can safely discount the opinion of anyone who uses "literally" to mean anything other than "literally" ( similarly anyone who uses "like" as a quotative) , even though both of those things are now in fairly common usage. > Your proposed style would make writing docs a lot harder, > I don't buy that at all. It takes a couple of seconds, if that, to come up with something. > forcing us to avoid use of the singular in cases where it is quite > natural. > Better than using the plural in the singular case. > I'm strongly opposed to such a style rule. > Meh. I don't really care how it's written, certainly not enough to make a stand about it. I'd rather you guys concentrate on writing the brilliant software than wasting time on stuff like this. I only replied because the conversation popped up in my inbox and it seemed to be something on which opinions were requested. Geoff
