Interesting article, much thanks for sharing your perspective. I enjoyed reading and can see your points on many things, but a few parts do bother me.
The main issue I have is that a very prescriptivist position is taken on the genderedness of "guys", but when it comes to "-man" suffixed words the prescriptive meaning of "people in general, humanity as a whole" is ignored in favor of the descriptivist "male-specific" meaning. Personally, I'm a descriptivist with many prescriptivist tendencies, so I can respect both positions independently, but together I find them confusing.
It seems to me that either, descriptively, "guys" can change to become gender neutral if people use it that way and "chairman" should change because it became gender specific through use; or, prescriptively, "guys" is gender specific because it is defined that way and "chairman" is gender neutral because it was defined that way. Internally, I just can't reconcile the seemingly arbitrary mixing of two opposing strategies.
Alternatives for Guys
y'all
If you aren't from the American South or one of the few other places that naturally say "y'all", then at best you look silly using it and very likely it comes off as insulting. If one of those isn't your intention, then probably best to avoid it.
Using They Instead of He (or She for That Matter)
I am one-hundred percent in the camp that "they" can be used for the singular, but it is also used for plural, so if there is more than one person in the hypothetical, then 'they' can become ambiguous. Using "they" instead of other pronouns is viable to do, but it can also be easier said than done, especially since many coders speak code better than they do natural language.
I generally try to rewrite such hypotheticals to be first person, so I can speak as my self (me, I), to the abstract reader (the generic you), and of others (they). This removes almost entirely the need to use any gendered pronouns.
Lastly, I've been using "she" as the default gendered pronoun in my non-technical writings for over a quarter century. What is the argument against default "she" for a (hypothetical) ungendered speaker?
You're trying to argue that we shouldn't worry about inclusive language, because the generations before us didn't worry about inclusive language, and that it can not matter if we restrict our cares to what our predecessors cared about. That seems...ill-advised, in a community that largely all works in a field that literally didn't exist a hundred years ago.
Are you saying that I hallucinated the paragraph with this?
It seems to me that either, descriptively, "guys" can change to become gender neutral if people use it that way and "chairman" should change because it became gender specific through use; or, prescriptively, "guys" is gender specific because it is defined that way and "chairman" is gender neutral because it was defined that way.
No, you didn't hallucinate the paragraph's existence, but if you think it says "we shouldn't worry about inclusive language, because the generations before us didn't worry about inclusive language", then you might be suffering from hallucinations since it doesn't say any such thing.
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Interesting article, much thanks for sharing your perspective. I enjoyed reading and can see your points on many things, but a few parts do bother me.
The main issue I have is that a very prescriptivist position is taken on the genderedness of "guys", but when it comes to "-man" suffixed words the prescriptive meaning of "people in general, humanity as a whole" is ignored in favor of the descriptivist "male-specific" meaning. Personally, I'm a descriptivist with many prescriptivist tendencies, so I can respect both positions independently, but together I find them confusing.
It seems to me that either, descriptively, "guys" can change to become gender neutral if people use it that way and "chairman" should change because it became gender specific through use; or, prescriptively, "guys" is gender specific because it is defined that way and "chairman" is gender neutral because it was defined that way. Internally, I just can't reconcile the seemingly arbitrary mixing of two opposing strategies.
If you aren't from the American South or one of the few other places that naturally say "y'all", then at best you look silly using it and very likely it comes off as insulting. If one of those isn't your intention, then probably best to avoid it.
I am one-hundred percent in the camp that "they" can be used for the singular, but it is also used for plural, so if there is more than one person in the hypothetical, then 'they' can become ambiguous. Using "they" instead of other pronouns is viable to do, but it can also be easier said than done, especially since many coders speak code better than they do natural language.
I generally try to rewrite such hypotheticals to be first person, so I can speak as my self (me, I), to the abstract reader (the generic you), and of others (they). This removes almost entirely the need to use any gendered pronouns.
Lastly, I've been using "she" as the default gendered pronoun in my non-technical writings for over a quarter century. What is the argument against default "she" for a (hypothetical) ungendered speaker?
You're trying to argue that we shouldn't worry about inclusive language, because the generations before us didn't worry about inclusive language, and that it can not matter if we restrict our cares to what our predecessors cared about. That seems...ill-advised, in a community that largely all works in a field that literally didn't exist a hundred years ago.
I think you might have responded to the wrong comment, because I didn't argue any such thing.
Are you saying that I hallucinated the paragraph with this?
Because if I did, my clipboard did, too...
No, you didn't hallucinate the paragraph's existence, but if you think it says "we shouldn't worry about inclusive language, because the generations before us didn't worry about inclusive language", then you might be suffering from hallucinations since it doesn't say any such thing.