Now this has become a digression… I worked for free as a teaching assistant for several months twice in my youth. At both schools I was responsible for listening to schoolkids read aloud. I got to know the books by rote, so I could have up to five kids at the same time reading aloud, all different books, and still pick up on errors and mispronunciations. It’s kind of incredible how the human brain - and mine is not exceptional - can manage pattern recognition.
Anyway. Back to our regular schedule of minor outrage…
“In my day we had these things called “books”, and we had to read hundreds of pages with no short plot summaries, and we liked it! It gave us something to do while riding our brontosaurs to the buggywhip factory!”
Literacy is for old people, like broadcast TV and cursive.
I don’t tend to use these terms (dudes, guys), but I’m generally indifferent to them being used and including me (I’m a woman). I dislike anyone calling me “bro” unless it’s clearly an exaggerated joking context.
I visit a client regularly, and on the shop floor there’s one team I interact with a lot where they often use “bro”, especially one man in particular. The team has a woman, who has simply started responding with “sis”. I chuckled when I heard her say it, and the man told me that it did bother him the first time but she challenged him to figure out why and he absolutely acknowledged that it came from displeasure at being refered to as a woman/feminine. However, he reasoned that instead of trying to stop saying “bro” (nearly every other sentence), he was just going to learn to be ok with “sis” and that’s how things currently are. The rest of the men on that team are all just going with it too.
This woman is my hero of the week for making this happen.
I generally find that it’s wholly possible to communicate by saying things like “hey” instead of “hey guys” or “what’s up” instead of “what’s up bro”. Other context clues help clarify who I’m addressing. But I’m also all on for just interchanging words with gendered histories and normalizing that too.
I really like y’all. I’m a québécoise anglophone (bilingual, really) and it’s really bizarre for me to use it, but it’s a fantastic word.
I just have a preference for dropping these words from my own language, and don’t really comment on someone using them to include me unless I know them well enough to joke around about it. I understand many people are fine with it, and I’m not the language police. I do find it interesting to think about, and consider where the language we use comes from, and to occasionally challenge it, but that’s more being a nerd than any militant advocate or whatever.
I’ve named my car a male-coded name (based on a funny reading of its SiriusXM radio ID) but when I plug it in it screams “charging started” in a distinctly female voice, so I think it’s possiblly gender-fluid or non-binary. Either way, I respect its choice as long as it keeps me safe (and perhaps a little less judgy on the lane assist, thank you…!)
I’ve been hearing (from all genders) and using “dude” in a gender-neutral way here in Chicago since the mid-90s, so much as “dude” is being used anymore (seems like it’s not quite as popular as twenty to thirty years ago.) The dictionaries seem to attribute it only to males, but, I hear it used for all genders (though, admittedly, moreso towards men.)
Nah, go high-tech and get an ASR-33! (ASR = “Automatic Send Receive”). It’s a KSR but with a paper tape reader and punch. In Ye Olde Dayes that was the standard I/O device on PDP-8s and other small computers – in fact, it was the only I/O device. Its input and output speed was 10 cps (characters per second). It predated the RS-232 serial interface; its connection to the computer was 20 ma current loop, usually in the form of a flat white plastic Molex connector. Yes, I’m old.
Well, except when a drill instructor or other hypermasculine leader type refers to his squad of inadequate and unimpressive charges as “ladies,” which is completely unproblematic and not at all reflective of underlying sexism, you betcha.
Nobody could possibly argue that society, and our associated language, has not been oppressively pervaded by male-centric sexism. But come on, let’s lighten up a little and consider that terms like “you guys” applied to a group of men and women, or of women only, has a perfectly understandable gender-neutral meaning in the present day.
Quite the digression! My apology might (or might not) be unnecessary; but IME trans folk are often more aware of gendered language than cis folk, and I wanted to be clear that, while I was annoyed at BigT, I wasn’t using a plausibly-deniable misgendering to express that annoyance.
For reasons I can’t really work out, that one really grates me.
I’m obviously not American. Probable reason for my discontent: I’m the proper English speaking son of a proper UK born English teacher, and while I never used “y’all” or even “you all” to address a group (or, shudder, a single person) I do know its provenance.
But this is up there with linguistic heresies, just like taking the second “i” out of “aluminium”.
