Town Heretic

Oh, but you know how addictive memes are...

Are you in any way surprised?

Just let them blunderbuss their way on...

I sure hope not, on both counts...

Took me several tries to get that message posted. TOL was horrible this morning, seems better now.

I know you don't agree with me. But you're not willing to hear me, or hear me out without drowning me in inflexible counterargument, and I feel badly about that.

I know about the single they, and use it somewhat frequently, but it has obvious limitations - although there's a good argument for "thou/they."

Language evolves, people adapt.

What I like seeing is the narrator shifting from he to she, and his to her when addressing an audience, whether listeners or readers. Stepping from "the engineer knows that her.... to the architect uses that information to inform his..." works rather well, I think (not abruptly from sentence to sentence but rather from point to point or idea/scenario to idea/scenario).

Anyway.

Yeah, it's constantly dropping at the server, timing out, giving error messages, etc. We lost a few hours' worth of posts again a couple days ago.

I wish I’d never brought this up, to be honest. You’re not hearing me.

I don’t doubt your good intentions, I know you too well. This conversation disappoints me. Not that I think you don’t have a good argument, but because you’re unwilling to consider I might have one that’s equally as good... and the opportunity for a richly satisfying conversation has been lost.

On to other things.

Wow. That comes off as pretty condescending. And forwarding your wife’s opinion of the idea I’m trying to share - as moronic and idiotic in the process as I may seem - was unnecessary.

Absent a superior choice? Lesser expression? Contrived sensitivity?

It’s quite possible your forging ahead with full awareness could be seen as a proffered insult.

How is integrating less default masculine language not rooted in reason? This seems like a silly argument on the surface, but it's not really. Is this just your personal unwillingness to write any other way than the way you want to, regardless of your audience? I'm genuinely curious. What kind of intimacy are you seeking with the other half of your audience?

How does it restrict your style to use something other than the masculine?

No worries, I'd figured at first that you just hadn't responded.

And wrt academic writing in academia - how to is indeed you must for some profs, and the fact that both MLA and APA (the two I've used) have issued guidelines shows where we're at now, and not where we were a few decades ago.

It's not a matter of personally resonating pronouns, TH - I'm getting at the idea (common now) of not defaulting to the masculine for generic pronouns.

And:

http://www.apaonlinecsw.org/apa-guidelines-for-non-sexist-use-of-language

Here you go. :)

https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/608/06/

You posted your last two on your own page.

Regardless, I'm in complete disagreement with you. :chuckle: There's no rhetorical flourish in acknowledging the other half of the population...

I actually think "Fanatics understand your greed/They" is less clear, as the sentence is switching between a singular fanatic and the lie told of a group by him. Someone might quickly read the following sentence structure as a comment about fanatics instead.

I suppose this is one area where I see a good impulse genuinely monkeying with good prose to no particularly good end. And we don't write in rhetorical flourishes in academic papers at any rate, so it's probably a moot point.

For example:

"He understands your greed. They want what you have, or to spoil it."

Fanatics understand your greed. They want what you have, or to spoil it.

Which solves the mismatched he/they at the same time.

It's not as acceptable as you might think. Neither are words like mankind.

You don't have to use he/she, I don't care for that myself and will find another way.

I know it's a typo, I know you know how to spell it. Just so unfortunate... :chuckle:

But the masculine pronoun - I had to learn how to undo that in my writing and Lit. classes, because it's no longer accepted as the default universal. Sometimes it means restructuring your sentences, but I learned to appreciate the change.