The Missing Resource?

@Noflaps said in #10:
But again, if you do have to pick a definition, the definition you use if that word influences the hit and miss rate.

If you use the one I use, you only have 1 in 2 chances. 50% of being incorrect.

If you use the other one, you have 1 into infinite (as the claim is that there are infinite genders, hence, infinite pronouns).

So, when you pick the definition, it influences the chances of being correct or incorrect. The first one is the better option.

And since most people is not the language police, 75% of the times or more you will be using the correct pronouns. its just matter if you use the correct one of the 2.

If you happen to be talking with the other minority, the pronoun you use will be wrong anyways.

Its a lose-lose situation if you use the second definition. The first one is the best chance you have to mitigate the problem. But again, you do have to pick which definition you use first. It influences the options that you have at your disposal.

Well @Alientcp , it's not me who "picks the definition" for determining whether or not a reader will become offended. It's the reader.

No matter which definition they pick or I pick, my choice of semantic approach remains quite limited in any event. Unless I'm missing something other than the new running shoes that I should probably get around at some point to buy.

Remember, my goal (in this context, at least) is to not offend at all -- which is better than taking a "50 / 50" shot at not offending. I thought the thread was closing in on a way to do that, already.

@Noflaps said in #12:
> Well @Alientcp , it's not me who "picks the definition" for determining whether or not a reader will become offended. It's the reader.

I know. But thats their choice. You are not picking the definition to offend anyone, you are picking it because it is objective. You can use the proper pronoun if you see them in person.

While if you use the other one, you will be wrong, whether you see them or not, as its subjective to how they feel at that particular moment.

But again. If you want to use a the most gender neutral pronoun you can find on the second definition (if that is even a thing), say, "they-them". 75% of the people or more DO NOT USE THEY - THEM PRONOUNS. So you will be wrong 75% of the times or more by default, and you will be using the wrong pronoun if you are facing the gender police anyways.

If you are blindly using a pronoun, you are going to mess up, its unavoidable. The only thing you can do is to mitigate the mistakes, reducing the chance of messing up. If you use the first definition, you are going to reduce the amount of mistakes as much as you can, if you use the second, you will be wrong 99% of the time.

Pick your poison.

@Noflaps The most common neopronouns I have stumbled upon is hir or ze.
Think both are added to the Oxford dictionary, so grammatically you should be fine using either one of those.

@NaturalBornTraveller said in #14:
> Think both are added to the Oxford dictionary, so grammatically you should be fine using either one of those.

@Noflaps Doh!!!
Forgot you are American.
Well maybe one day, Merriam-Webster will upgrade their dictionary to include neopronouns?
And maybe one day, correct all of their misspellings?

Being rather fond of English (the language of the Bard, Churchill and Tom Wolfe), and with all due respect to Oxford, I shall not be adding "hir" or "ze" or similar fantasy constructions to my word palette. Churchill did not and would not bellow "we shall fight zem on the beaches..." And nobody any of us will ever meet could wield the language for good more ably than Churchill.

But I appreciate all suggestions.

As for "75% of the people or more" not using "THEY - THEM PRONOUNS" (to selectively quote the helpful @Alientcp) I can only say:

1) 98.735 % of all statistics displayed in chatrooms are made up on the spot, and

2) I pretty sure all English speakers do indeed use "they" and "them" when they write or speak. Those are not evil foreign words designed to lure us into the rule of the commissars.

I don't really think that being referred to as "they" or "them" is as likely to offend as much as simply to confuse.

Oh, I give up. I can't make everybody happy, and my best strategy is to try not to look ridiculous. But it's probably too late to avoid that.

Thanks to all who responded. And if any have more to say, I will patiently await enlightenment.

@Noflaps said in #16:
> Churchill did not and would not bellow "we shall fight zem on the beaches..."
Screw Churchill, he not only copy/pasted most of his speeches, including the aforementioned above.
He was born into a position of power, and was also co-responsible for countless of unnecessary deaths during the landing in Gallipoli (during WW1)

> 1) 98.735 % of all statistics displayed in chatrooms are made up on the spot, and
Bullshit... 230.75% of all people online, use only well thought out and documented arguments.

> 2) I pretty sure all English speakers do indeed use "they" and "them" when they write or speak. Those are not evil foreign words designed to lure us into the rule of the commissars.
For over a 1000 years, mainland European countries have dictated the English language. We don't need some new, up an' commer American to mess it all up.
The french, Danish and German agreed a long time ago, that the English language belongs to us.
(Us as in hir and ze people, not us as in American)

> Thanks to all who responded.
Not like we had anything better to do!
Legally English left the European union, so we are not allowed to go viking on them anymore.

Language change over time, as do we all.
But you being an editor, it kind of surprised me, that you take such a harsh stance against adding new words for clarification.
Especially words that you, yourself asked for.

You can't cling to the past, to find the words to describe the future.
There is a reason why people don't write in Cunei form anymore;-)

@NaturalBornTraveller Actually the rejection of neopronouns is quite a common point of anger amongst many North Americans, and part of the reason Jordan Peterson is now famous.

To the best of my understanding, the reason why is because I think it implicitly tramples on certain ideas that gender should map to sex in a binary way, and to some that just seems flat out wrong. And when someone just expects you to "respect their pronouns" in a way they are asking you to throw away that model. For many conservatives especially it just seems morally wrong to accept this, because the feeling is that those who adopt these neopronouns are getting fundamental reality wrong, and it is more likely there is something wrong with their brains than that gender is fluid or that one can have hundreds of custom designations.

For me I also to be honest don't know exactly what the answer is. I definitely accept that trans people are real and that their condition is a real one, and for them switching gender from "he" to "her" and vice-versa makes sense. But I am not so sure of whether people can reject ANY gender or switch it daily as well. I don't know if there is any scientific research done on this issue. And to some extent I think there is a real fear about characterizing anything as a disorder or disability anymore because you might offend those people now. As I recall there was an official commission in Britain on why so many youth were electing for trans surgery, and even though they found in many cases that there was unreasonable and undue pressure on kids to switch without having done a full psychological examination that would normally help explain and even reverse those feelings, instead of listening to that report, large groups of people just dismissed the commission's report as transphobic. So you know...I kind of have sympathy for both sides. The way people behave in general seems really extreme and stupid.

There are even some academic papers in the humanities that question whether being disabled should even be considered as some sort of permanent injury, or whether they should be regarded only as "differently abled". There is just this denial of reality going on now, where even though you may be crippled, you are being taught to think of that as somehow being normal just because they want to avoid facing certain stigmas.

There are genuinely a lot of scary and frankly backwards opinions and ideas in the literature, especially in the social sciences...and its kind of hard to know where the respectable science ends and when we have some sort of agenda-driven branch of academia that begins.

At last, conversation flowers.

But Churchill did not "copy / paste" his speeches. Churchill was a master word painter.

Churchill is the man. Admit it. Find peace.

I would just write as usual.

I'm sure if you make a mistake in gender identity you will quickly be corrected.