[ExI] Gender-Neutral Side Note

[Tara Maya]

The problem is that “they” has already become the de facto neutral third person, mirroring the “thee / thou” being replaced for singular and plural “you.”

If the pattern continues, English will do away with “me / I” and we will always refer to ourselves with the royal “we” all the time. 

As for ourself of course, we already do so. ��

Tara Maya



> On Nov 6, 2025, at 11:06, Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> 
> On 06/11/2025 17:40, spike wrote:
>> Side note: I also propose returning the pronouns he and him to genderless, restoring she and her to specifically female, and if we ever need a specifically masculine gender (when was the last time you needed that grammatical construct?  (never?  (same here))) then the pronouns become hemale and hismale and maleman.  Extension: terms such as guy and man also revert to genderless.  Reason: after all this time, a quarter of a century at least, we never found a good way around the linguistic clumsiness we introduce with genderless pronouns.  That he-or-she and the whole they/them business, forget it.  To hell with all that, let he and him be genderless again, introduce new pronouns when we need a specifically male pronoun, which is never in that quarter century we have been committing comically absurd and unnecessary violence to language, trying to solve a non-problem.  Make androgyny genderless again.
> 
> 
> Give that man a medal!
> 
> We can re-instate words like 'chairman' instead of 'chairperson' (or even 'chair', which I've heard a lot recently. A chair is something you sit on, for christ's sake!), 'mankind', 'salesman', etc.
> 
> The problem is, we will be accused of 'outdated gender stereotyping', as per this:
> 
> https://metro.co.uk/2020/05/19/un-releases-list-gender-neutral-replacements-commonly-used-words-12725607/
> 
> Which just leads to hilarity:
> https://universalenglish.org/gender-neutral-terms/
> 
> --
> Ben
> 
> 
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