this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
1052 points (97.1% liked)

Memes

45730 readers
839 users here now

Rules:

  1. Be civil and nice.
  2. Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

is not very intuitive though

Yes it is. It's completely intuitive. Native English speakers do it all the time every day. The singular "they" is used literally without conscious thought. The only time it becomes controversial is with transphobes talking about specific people who do not identify with their gender assigned at birth. Even transphobes use singular "they" without thinking in contexts like this OP where the gender is unknown. (Which is why their "but it's bad grammar!" arguments fall flat.)

[–] Kleysley@lemmy.fmhy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Just because people with years of experience with something don't have to think about it, doesn't mean it's intuitive.

As a non-native speaker, I don't find it intuitive at all, even though I don't have to think about it anymore. And as you can see by their post, OP didn't find it intuitive either.

[–] zaros@zaros.club 1 points 1 year ago

I'd say what's intuitive is very subjective. Most of a language tends to be intuitive to its native speakers, no matter how unintuitive it seems to someone else.

To me the intuitive genderless option for "he/she" would be "it". Coming from Finnish, it seems much more natural to have "it" include people instead of using "they" for both singular and plural. Or if using "they", it would feel intuitive to say "they is" instead of "they are".