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Comment by mhb | Hacker News Reader

> I think you could fairly easily talk someone through landing

The bad news is that it is 10/28 (east-west) and the wind was reported from the north at 11 knots gusting 17.

KPBI 101553Z 02011G17KT 10SM SCT042 SCT046 26/15

A student pilot with 20 hours of training probably wouldn’t have been signed off by his/her/zir/their instructor to operate in that kind of crosswind.

From: https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2022/05/10/a-hero-flies-th...

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That’s neat and it does make it a bit more impressive. But an instructor who thought you had a 90% chance of landing without dying wouldn’t accept 10% risk and sign off, so it doesn’t say much about the overall odds.

But I didn’t realize he was flying a turboprop in crosswinds though!

“signed off by his/her/zir/their instructor to operate” What does “zir” mean? I’ve seen it around but can’t remember where.

I’ve seen it used as a gender neutral pronoun and some people prefer it to his/her but most people now just use “their” when they don’t know don’t know the gender of the person they are talking about.

With woke pronouns, I feel like an 87 yo man around tiktok - don't care, not going to learn it, not enough time left on Earth to give a crap, happy to glide towards the grave without giving it a second thought. Y'all do you.

I feel like that around anything after icq and msn messenger.

Then why post about it?

again, 87 yo around tiktok - voicing my unbidden opinion is part of the package.

it's an old-style gender neutral pronoun that has mostly fallen out of favor

It's a phrase Greenspun uses a lot on his blog, mocking excessive concern with gender pronouns. (In between a lot of interesting content, he constantly bangs on about 2 topics: how dumb he thinks liberals are, and how US divorce law discriminates against men.)

Somehow it's always family court with these guys.

It's a gender neutral pronoun.

How is it different than using “their”?

It shows you’re woke.

And/or using it ironically, as he does.

Unlike singular their, it's non-standard.

Some people feel like "their" is plural and therefore invented a singular gender-neutral pronoun.

"Their" is grammatically plural, even though what it refers to may be singular, plural, or neither (or, in some cases, may be unknown). "You" is also grammatically plural, even though what it refers to may be singular, plural, or neither. (Singular they seems to be from the 14th century, so it isn't really new.)

It is clear that it is singular.

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