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Comment by gurjeet | Hacker News Reader

s/his/her/

There used to be times when people didn't care for technicalities like this because the focus was on the person's contribution to the discussion.

Now that everyone's replaceable, the popular culture desperately tries to shift focus into arguing about pronouns and terms.

Watch out, this is a road to nowhere. Forcing others to use the right pronoun won't build up your retirement fund, but will distract you from worrying about not having one. And the fact that you care about it more than about your opponent's T-shirt color could be an indication that you are being manipulated to not think about the long-term things.

This is a surprisingly profound and insightful comment so deep in the subthread of, more or less, a shitpost.

Thank you, sir, for elevating our collective level of discourse.

> you are being manipulated to not think

This is where it crosses from insightful into conspiracy theory territory for me. People seem perfectly capable of groupthink-deluding themselves. Why cheapen your argument by postulating some master manipulator when it's not necessary for the deeper point you're making?

It will only lead to people focussing the discussion to challenge this particular aspect, or them disregarding all you've said, instead of engaging with the actual meat of the argument.

'Their' works fine and has been gender-neutral English for ages.

Ages is subjective, it came back in to popularity only recently

That varies based on location and regional dialect. Here in the northeast US, I remember using singular they/their since the 80's. It would be interesting to know when this become popular elsewhere.

80s in Australia too, been hearing/using it my whole life.

Though with respect to 'ages' apparently it's been around since at least the 14th century but certain purists tried to stamp it out at various times (just like the singular 'you' which no one currently has grammatical issues with I hope).

https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they...

I remember some people tried to get BLM into German discussions, which made absolutely zero sense, as we have a complete different history and culture. Now I see this popping up. I really hope Europe can get some cultural distance between itself and the USA in the near future. The time is ripe.

> s/his/her/

s/his/their

I believe you mean:

s/s\/his\/her/s\/his\/their/

s#s/his/her#s/his/their# also works and avoids awkward escaping. The first symbol after s is used as the separator. Works in vim, at least.

In other words:

s%s/s\\/his\\/her/s\\/his\\/their/%s#s/his/her#s/his/their#%

Did you just assume my regex engine is pcre gendered???

Wow, I've never heard this joke before. Original and well-applied to the situation.

    awkward escaping

Or as I've seen it called, "leaning toothpick syndrome".

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