Clearly, there are no perfect answers to this dilemma, so we will need to satisfy ourselves with an imperfect one. Which one, I don’t particularly care.
To me, a more interesting question is, *why *did the English language evolve without a gender-neutral pronoun in the first place? I would have thought it would be a very useful item from the git-go, but somehow it never came up? There has to be a back-story in there…TRM
That question was kind of implicit in the OP. I assume that in less enlightened times they did just as mentioned above and used the male pronoun.
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The worker dropped a hammer and injured a toe.
Lisa and Jim are fraternal twins; they love each other.
Exactly. There are ways of saying anything without needing a gender neutral, third-person pronoun. In fact, I think it could make a fun game for grammar Nazis to try and stump each other.
When the King James Version of the Bible was written, even the word its was uncommon. The translators got around using it anyway.
Branes all gone. Zombees ate it.
Maybe because you aren’t the one being described. If someone referred to me as “it” then I’d believe they were deliberately trying to insult me. This has been the case the few times I have heard known adult individuals referred to as “it”. Babies or fetuses are often called “it” without any ill intent because their gender is either not obvious or is as yet unknown, but it’s pretty offensive when applied to an adult.
You’ve still got a gendered pronoun in there. You’d have to say “The worker injured its toe when it dropped a hammer on it”, which is awkward, repetitive, and rather confusing.
So. I bet skule wont do no good neither then.
That’s the risk you tale when you stand too close to a worker whilst (heh heh) it’s using a hammer.
Not fer me. No skule. Just…BRAAAAAAANES!
(srsly, mangeorge, my irony detector doesn’t work sometimes. There was more snark in my response than was appropriate. I chose…poorly.)
No, not exactly. Not really, That’s awkward. Try a little creative writing without using pronouns. The first outside reader would likely toss a pronoun-free work of fiction before finishing the first chapter.
How many times can you say “Bob” when referring to Bob, the main character?
Grammar Nazis would never try *and *do anything. They might well try to do something though.
Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
As stated above, there are ways in which the sentence can be written that are gender neutral. Consider “NilaNguyen’s status has been updated - would you like to see it?”
What is funny about all of this is that computers use the most prescriptivist languages that exist, the artificial languages of coding. That there is some code monkey out there who can carefully write out all the precise instructions to create this universal module and who doesn’t care about the rules in English baffles me.
You overestimate a programmer’s ability to influence what is presented to the end user. Someone in the process (developer, architect, quality tester, etc.) certainly brought attention to the issue where it was promptly out-voted by a team of marketers who insist that it says “their.”
I’ve calmed down, read all the posts, and thought it over. Using “they” to refer to one person still grates.
If I’m not successful in using “it”, I’ll revert to the tried and true, though requiring more keystrokes, “he/she”. Or “she/he”, depending upon my mood.
The language is english, so I can do as I please.