Yes that’s exactly it
You know, that’s a pattern for human thought that transcends all of history. It was summed up by Hegel with his concept of the thesis and antithesis (later misappropriated by Marx). People always take up some exaggerated position, then other people come in to call them idiots and stake the opposite position. Only after a while (sometimes… a really long while) do heads cool down and people realize that both sides are about as right as they are wrong, and that the truth is somewhere in the middle and a mile to the north.
I dunno, I think this might be the way things should work. You do agree that you get a lot more people replying to the OP and talking…
Isn’t it true that the “best” level of a language is used by the legal institutions? Laws, contracts, constitutions etc. need the very best level of language for clarity.
That said, women traditionally haven’t had an equal place in the eyes of the law. It would have been crazy to say, “A voter is required to register in her precinct by…” when there were no female voters. Take this and other areas where women were expressly not invited, and there’s your trend starting.
Maybe it’s like the word “colored.” My folks and older members of my family used the word for years, with no intended disrespect. But bring that up to a African-American today and get ready for some flak. They’ll probably say you should NEVER use that word. It’s a historic throwback to the days of “colored only” stuff, not one of George Carlin’s seven words you can never say on TV, i.e. so intrinsically loaded with imagery etc. (Antidote if bitten: mention the NAACP—National Association for the Advancement for COLORED Persons).
Likewise it’s all “Asian” now instead of “Oriental.” “Oriental” simply means “Eastern.”
I digress. Memories of oppression drive the political correctness.
‘Youse guys’? ‘YOUSE GUYS’?!?! Don’t you know ‘guys’ means ‘men’?! You’re just reinforcing the stereotype that you should never talk to women!!!111oneoneeleven
This makes it sound like folks are consciously forcing ‘they’ to fill a role it’s not intended for. It’s frankly been standard English for a long, long time, and it’s the cutesy words like the aforementioned “yo” or “sie” or “e” or whatever attempted coinage that are forcing the issue.
I agree with you, but just as a nitpick, I believe “yo” arose naturally in the Baltimore area, rather than being contrived in the manner of “sie” or “e”. But, certainly, none of them are part of standard English the way singular “they” is.
Not at all. Much legal language is utterly incomprehensible to people who are not trained in the law. That’s why “plain language” statutes have been passed to mandate that legal language be rendered comprehensible to laypeople. (Legal language has been vetted by court cases so that its meaning has been codified by precedent. That’s why lawyers continue to use it. The more formal, nit-picky, all-encompassing, and non-standard it is the more likely that courts will parse it in a certain way. That doesn’t work for everyday speech.)
The language of law is a jargon. All jargons contain terms that are precisely defined within the jargon but are at variance with the way they are used in common language. This makes sense because it ensures that everybody inside the profession uses the term in the same way. However, this precision does not cross boundaries into other jargons. And nobody can possibly learn all the thousands of jargons that exist.
Generalese is the form of the language that everybody learns to speak, so it is usable by everyone no matter what professional jargon they speak. That makes it by definition - by my definition anyway - the best form of the language. It’s the form of the language everyone uses here on the Dope, in books, in everyday speech, for almost every conceivable need. You only need to learn it once, although continual refinements, accretions, additions, and variations are a fact of life.
Oh, man, that makes me feel like the writer is schizophrenic when I rarely come across it in literature. It makes it seem like the text is referring to two different people. I just can’t do it. Do you switch sentence to sentence? Paragraph to paragraph? Something else?
It’s not exactly a change. It’s been used in gender-neutral sense since at least the 14th century, and by a many great writers, from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Spenser to Austen to Dickens, Kipling, Auden, etc. No forge necessary.
In fact, the dictionary.com usage note states the following:
It’s no more difficult determining whether “they” refers to a singular or plural antecedent than determining whether “he” refers to a male or gender-neutral antecedent.
As you say. It certainly doesn’t suffer from attempting to blend she and he together. I’d be amazed if it gained traction outside its current area, though.
Personally I think it’s stupid. I can’t STAND to see it in real life, because it seems stilted. I prefer he or she. If it’s a more casual setting then they seems fine to me.
I was taught that way ever since I was a child, that you use “he” in those circumstances. It is quite common in many other languages. In this context “he” means the same as does “Man” when speaking of the human race. It’s not men, specifically, it’s just a word.
Deliberately changing it to “she” seems stilted. If we’ve been doing something wrong, then we don’t need to go and swing all the way to the other side. If we think it needs to go then let’s pick a new one. I think “they” works just fine. It’s never a problem in conversation. If it’s ambiguous in writing we can spell it differently like “thay” or something. But to me writing the word “she” for everything is a stilted as words like “herstory” and “womyn”. It seems petty and childish. I think that “he” is neutral enough, but if other people think that “he” is biased, how does changing it to “her” make it any better?
Or we use schkle
Take, for instance, the Constitution of the United States. At the time it was written, English was different than the language we know today. Naturally they would write it in the clearest language possible, avoiding slang expressions that were likely to fall out of usage or be subject to misinterpretation.
OK, it’s a great document. And as long as we hold it dear, it is fixed in stone. We don’t want this to turn into something like “Animal Farm” where the rules are subtly rephrased or rewritten every time we go back to consult them unless there’s a transparent process and all that. But common usage of the language continues and will change, while that document remains static. With time that gap will likely widen.
Your points about jargon, IMO, are correct. But I think also that if a new law were made today, while it would contain jargon, would also strive for clarity and correctness, and these transcend both legalese and generalese. I didn’t mean to imply that “because it’s legal, it’s the best language.” Rather, I would say, “If it’s going to be in a legal document, courts are going to put the clearest, most correct language in it that they possibly can, because there could be a lot at stake.” Some of that may of course have to be jargon that everyday people won’t understand.
New laws are made every single day. They are often so cryptic that even the lawyers can’t figure out what they might possibly mean. That’s why the courts are so busy.
Unless by law you mean constitution. But a constitution is a wholly different entity from a law. And as we’ve seen with the Supreme Court decision yesterday, even the simplest, most direct language - as in the 2nd amendment - is agreed upon by no two people. Four members of the Court didn’t even agree with the other five.
English is not capable of a complex sentence that is understandable by everyone. Read these boards for five minutes and you’ll be forced to agree. 
I don’t switch if the unnamed, theoretical person is supposed to be the same “person” from one sentence to the next. The overall effect is that I generally switch from document to document. In one article, I use “he” and in the next, I use “she.”
I’m with CC in post 23 or so. I use s/he and my boss has even plagiarized, er, picked it up, from a memo I sent to him and reused it in a memo he sent up the line. I did not know the sex of a caller whose concern had to be reported.
Well that’s rather different, isn’t it?
I wrote:
> This strikes me as a typical example of “I’ll wildly exaggerate in the OP so
> people will need to exaggerate in their replies too. After all, a thread in which
> everyone overstates their positions is so much more informative than one in
> which people are accurate.”
Alex_Dubinsky writes:
> You know, that’s a pattern for human thought that transcends all of history. It
> was summed up by Hegel with his concept of the thesis and antithesis (later
> misappropriated by Marx). People always take up some exaggerated position,
> then other people come in to call them idiots and stake the opposite position.
> Only after a while (sometimes… a really long while) do heads cool down and
> people realize that both sides are about as right as they are wrong, and that
> the truth is somewhere in the middle and a mile to the north.
>
> I dunno, I think this might be the way things should work. You do agree that
> you get a lot more people replying to the OP and talking…
I completely disagree with this. Such threads increase the number of people replying only in the sense they add a lot of useless, poorly thought-out replies. What generally happens is that after an OP that makes some wild, over-the-top statement about some subject, there will be thirty or forty posts making similar statements exaggerated in one way or another. Finally, if we’re lucky, someone will make some reasonable statement about the subject and the discussion will settle down into an actual informative exchange. If we’re not lucky, the thread will continue for many pages with people screaming at each other and nothing will ever get resolved. Far too many posters think that the motto of the SDMB is “Expressing our opinions without listening to other people” rather than “Fighting ignorance.”
Now that’s something I’ve never seen used. Generic usage of ‘she’ I come across a lot in academic articles I read, authored by men and women alike. So you’re writing about voters or parliamentarians or something and you get sick and tired of typing ‘he or she’ all the time but you want to indicate you’re no chauvinist pig so you pick she. Happens all the time.
Aren’t you just perpetuating the problem? And who exactly would lecture you? A woman? Or a man?