Apologies. I acknowledge that I tend to use “he” as a general pronoun when the gender is unclear. I should try to amend that. Whether I will be successful or not at age 63 is questionable.
What is the appropriate pronoun? Third person “they”?
I believe “they” is correct.
Here’s a recent 300-post now-closed discussion on exactly this point:
But is “they” acceptable when the gender is unclear? (I don’t want to read the whole quoted post.) Asking to make sure my answer was right to Dinsdale.
The consensus answer is “they” is always acceptable unless who you are speaking to/about has explicitly told you they prefer something else.
“They” is explicitly for the case where gender is uncertain. But it’s not wrong even if you are certain.
I grew up in hay country and moved a lot of hay, including a lot into lofts. I’ve never heard “haymow” and worked with many old timers. Maybe it is a regional term?
We moved hay by hand using trailers which we called “trailers”. We used harrow beds for the larger fields.
For moving the baled hay into the loft, we used a hay elevator and in one of the barns, a huge hay hook connected to a large pulley and rope. We could swing the bale and hoist it at the correct time to someone on the loft with hand hooks. Snag it and hope you don’t get pulled off!
TIL Isaac Asimov (whose birthday it is) died of HIV/AIDS. He got it from a blood transfusion, and died nine years later. He kept it secret so it wouldn’t affect his family’s reputation.
Which reminds me of a truly horrid joke from the early death-sentence days of then-AIDS before HIV was isolated and named.
Q: What’s the hardest part about getting an AIDS diagnosis?
A: Convincing your mother you’re Haitian.
Reputation seemed to matter a lot more than health did in those benighted days. Still does in some circles. Humans are very slow learners and their societies learn even slower than people do. Idjits.
OT, but there’s a shot in Boardwalk Empire where Richard Harrow, back in Wisconsin, is standing next to his namesake.
I’m convinced by this live version:
You never pronounced it, seg-OOO?
You still see those giant hay hooks (more like a claw) on barns around here although I believe no one uses them any more. They were designed to load hay into barns before balers became the norm – the hay was loose, pitchforked into a hay wagon (haywain) and thence, via the hay hooks, up into the loft (or mow). Mow is the older word but you still hear it sometimes. My neighbor has an impressive earthen ramp to nowhere in an old field, where a hay barn once stood. It is common in hilly areas to situate a barn such that you can drive a wagon up to the loft via a ramp, greatly easing the labor of loading hay into it.
We have a hay elevator since our barn wasn’t built into a hill like that.
I think I learned the world haymow from Charlotte’s Web when I was six or seven.
The big hook we used was for baled hay. It was a very large curved hook (probably 2’ long of so) with places to grab it with both hands and sink into the bale. I’ve scoured the interwebs and cannot find anything close.
Hmm. That’s not what I was thinking of. Maybe someone made it for that barn.
I just found out this week that the fairy tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin was based on a true event and that we even know the year and possibly the date on which it happened. (Not the luring all the rats out of town with a flute - that was added later - but the genesis of the tale is apparently a man who came to the village in June 1284 and convinced 130 young people to leave with him for parts unknown, with speculation being that he was an imperial employee looking for ethnic Germans to settle newly acquired territories in Poland and Transylvania.)
It could’ve been a one-off. It worked well and we could get several tons of hay up on that loft. It was a horse barn and I could feed to all stalls in the barn from up there through chutes. The old timer that owned it was pretty inventive. I fed the horses when he was gone and I was a regular poop scooper.
A Straight Dope Staff Report by Eutychus: Was the Pied Piper of Hamelin a child molester?
Nothing to add to the thread except to say that I was there, close to the stage on the right. Epic set!
In 1992 was working the lone night counter at Kinkos when the local TV news anchorwoman came in to pick up an ordered. Mobile phones were new then, but she was an early and apt adapter; true to a vocation with many moving parts constantly in play.
As she was exchanging information with whoever was on the other end while checking her printing order, she mentioned “I’m here at Kinkos with Slithy.” I felt so validated by that! A prominent member of the business community recognized aloud me as someone of significance who eagerly did his part to keep things smoothly flowing.
It was only way too many years later that it penetrated my skull at an appropriately obtuse angle that she’d nametag-checked me to her remote contact in case the threat of Slithy climbing over that counter in an empty Kinkos and assaulting her became reality.
Heh. I had two letter grades taken off of my first English 102 theme for using the constructions “everyone…they” and “anyone…they”. “He” was the only word the instructor would accept there, and the instructor was female.