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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Gender neutral pronouns suck in English. Fix that before you start firing people over not using them.

No doubt, I was taught in the 80's in high school that "they" is only applicable to plural and "he" is the generic if you don't know sex of the person.

If I ever release a project, I'm just going to ban all pronouns because of how screwed up pronouns are in English. I'll just use single letters (U for user, P for programmer, etc).

We recently added 'hen' as a gender neutral pronound in Swedish, to go with 'han' (he) and 'hon' (she).

The impression of that change in the US media seemed to be "oh my God, look at those overly politically correct Europeans inventing words to be politically correct" (when they noticed it at all).

What was the impression on the ground in Sweden?

Truth. I figured after Facebook started using "they" in a singular sense that the grammar rules would change. They have only unofficially.

They or their as singular has been part of recognised English for a very long time.

"God send every one their heart's desire!" - Much Ado About Nothing, Act III Scene 4

"There's not a man I meet but doth salute me, As if I were their well-acquainted friend." - Comedy of Errors, Act IV Scene 3

That's a fair point, and "they" certainly does work well in some places. But if you took every use of "he" or "she" from Shakespeare and replaced it with "they", then we'd have a problem. And that's what this post is hinting at doing.

It's harder to write non-gendered stuff in English than to write gendered stuff, but I'm sure Shakespeare would have been pretty easily up to the job if he had cared.

Running `s/he/they` on Shakespeare's current literature would fail, but why is that a problem? Don't you think Shakespeare could have made it work from the beginning if that was a big issue at the time?

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