(This is part of a longer guidelines that I am working on). The problem has been solved and forgotten in the history of the English language a few times over.
Summary: Gender-nondiscriminatory and non-sexist language 0. Simply use no salutations (in Emails) or non-gendered ones and avoid gendered references. For the second part, this boils down to getting your pronouns right. The best practice would be to use "they", break grammar rules on number and do not not respect gender-normative rules. Thus "they is pretty " should be fine. The rationale is that grammar should follow usage and "they is pretty" was grammatically correct for many centuries and is correct again. Do not use s/he and such as these presume a binary state of affairs (trans people get included) and discriminate against bi-gendered, a-gendered people and others. Words of salutation: "Hey Y'all" "all y'all (plural)" "Hi = Hello" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:EN-y%27all.ogg 1. The other option is to avoid personal pronouns... it is possible if you are never verbose enough. References: http://www.autostraddle.com/more-than-words-keeping-it-pronouns-pt-1-186683/ http://www.autostraddle.com/more-than-words-pronouns-pt-2-howd-gender-get-in-here-188430/ http://www.autostraddle.com/more-than-words-adjective-invective-194457/ http://web.mit.edu/trans/GenderNeutralPronouns.pdf http://www.aetherlumina.com/gnp/intro.html http://www.aetherlumina.com/gnp/faq.html http://www.english.illinois.edu/-people-/faculty/debaron/essays/epicene.htm http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Nonsexist_language (needs more updating) _________________ Best A. Mani A. Mani CU, ASL, AMS, CLC, CMS http://www.logicamani.in _______________________________________________ WFS-India mailing list [email protected] Message archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Unsubscribe: To unsubscribe, please login to your account at http://www.wfs-india.org/ and unsubscribe to the WFS-India list from your account settings. -- WFS-India - http://www.wfs-india.org
