I suppose he could’ve gone with “No, I’ll be staying with Ms. Norinew.” If the hotel person demands to know anything further about your relationship, he could reply, “That just cut your tip by 25%. Each additional nosy question will be an additional 25% off.”
Boyfriend and girlfriend sound ageless to me. I see no reason to come up with a new word when they’re sitting there begging to be lifted out of high school and into the realm of adulthood.
I, personally, am working on making -sexual happen. Boysexual is so much less wordage than gay men and straight women and the reverse is true for girlsexual.
Yeah, it’s a super-no-big-deal, barely enough even to, y’know, discuss on a messageboard. I tend not to ask because I’m socially awkward and get paranoid about being perceived as clueless, so I remain clueless instead.
Dude, just ask and if they get weird or snippy, blame it on ‘pregnancy brain’ and walk away.
Ah. Well, if it helps, phrase the question to acknowledge your cluelessness. Just say something like, “Oh, you probably said and I’ve forgotten already, is John your business partner?”
Actually, the “You’ve probably said and I’ve forgotten already” gambit is an excellent one for asking all sorts of questions. I’m always ready to admit to cluelessness. 
As a user of English as a foreign language one thing that has sometimes had me raise my hackles by mistake is the use of ‘you’ not only in a personal but also in an impersonal sense.
Personal ‘you’: referring to the person you are adressing e.g. ‘If you come tomorrow, be sure to bring pie’.
Impersonal ‘you’: speaking in the abstract e.g. ‘If you commit (heinous crime) chances are you won’t get way with it’.
Whether the personal or the impersonal ‘you’ is meant seems to be entirely depending on context, so there are bound to be misunderstandings, particularly with people whose first language does not use the impersonal ‘you’. For example, if you spoke to me using a literal translation of my second example above into German, I’d take it as a personal attack.
Curiously enough English does have a perfectly serviceable impersonal construction equivalent to e.g. German man or French on: ‘If one commits (heinous crime) chances are one won’t get way with it’. Only, its use seems to be confined to a certain kind of pretentious (mostly, ficticious) persona.
I hope I’m not regarded as pretentious. It was actually my study of German those many years ago that encouraged me to use the “one” construct much more than the average American. Not in casual, conversational speech, though. <- In informal situations I even use sentence fragments.
You spelled it wrong. Should be “I wil wheaton tomorrow.”
I think the English language needs counting words, like what Chinese uses. Specifically, English should use a separate counting word for each variety of object (flat round things, cylindrical things, animals, bottles, people, etc.)
Please, can we live that punk Wil Wheaton from* Star Trek: The Next Generation* out of this discussion. 
It’s really not that clever: if we actually did write in that manner, it would eventually seem natural. And, in order to make the point, it had to be decipherable, which means it isn’t that bad.
I appreciate what you’re trying to do functionally, but I don’t see how those can escape connotations of paedophilia.
Or sheep?
Shakespeare used the singular “they”.
Spanish technically has gender neutral third person singular pronouns, but it is normally not used. The language structure, though, is heavily gendered so it feels normal to address almost anyone and anything as having an inherent gender.
“¿Ha visto Ud. mi camisa?”
“Ella es en el suelo.”
“Have you seen my shirt?”
“She is on the floor.”
An obvious problem with fixing spelling is how to decide whose accent to spell. Do we bow to the Bostonians and Londoners and start Paking a ka?
English originally did have this. But eventually the counting adjectives developed distinct identities from the objects they were describing. You can still see remnants of this in words like pair, couple, duo, dyad, and brace which can all describe two objects.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Inner Stickler
I, personally, am working on making -sexual happen. Boysexual is so much less wordage than gay men and straight women and the reverse is true for girlsexual.
How about just swiping the words from greek for philandrist and philogynist. Althought the first is perhaps too near to philanthrope. virsexual and gynosexual, to combine latin and greek?
This was my immediate thought as well. I have to stop myself from saying “yous” sometimes.
Philandrist sounds like someone who philanders.
Well, you’ve just shown that English actually has such a word that everyone immediately understands. You just have a prejudice against it. I hear it every day, and people never misunderstand it or think people who use it are juvenile when they’re clearly not.