Re: Prefer non-gender specific pronouns

[Ilkka Virta]

On Sun, Jun 6, 2021 at 2:49 PM Léa Gris <lea.gris@noiraude.net> wrote:

> Either you're acting in bad faith, or you're so confused by your
> gender-neutral delusion that you don't remember that in normal people's
> grammar, "they" is a plural pronoun.
>

Argh, no, that's just an example of the fact that I can't read. Sorry.

I do agree, it would be useful if English did have separate singular
pronouns, both for
"you" and "they". But since it doesn't, we have to work with what we have.
For the second
person, there's of course "thou", but for some reason, I've never heard
anyone suggest using
that in practice.

I do wonder, though, what the gender-neutral delusion here would be? That
there exist women
who use computers and Unix-like systems, and not just men? Even I know, in
real life, some
female Linux users, and while I haven't asked about shells, I expect they
might use Bash at
least to some extent. So I don't think it's unrealistic to accept the fact
that not all users of Bash
might be "he". That may of course have been different 30 years ago, but
then, the times do
change.