Hi again Thanks for answers.
We could have an elaborate discussion about linguistics, or we could change the text on the site so anyone feels at home. For the comfort of hermaphrodites I think "the developer's" is a good suggestion. Redundancy is not as bad as people feeling sad for not belonging, right? Gary, you seem to be a girl of great humor and mathematical asberger's and since about 1,7 of the world's population are hermaphrodites you with your amazing skills can easily calculate that 98,3 % is better than 90%. And then maybe we should ponder the fact that so few women are participating to open source. I think "because of Garys". Russ, you made my day! I will redirect my question, thanks Eric for directions. Best regards, Chris 2010/6/4 Mike Frysinger <vap...@gentoo.org> > On Thursday, June 03, 2010 22:26:49 Eric Blake wrote: > > On 06/03/2010 06:28 PM, Russ Allbery wrote: > > > Eric Blake <ebl...@redhat.com> writes: > > >> Thanks for the report. However, English is one of those silly > languages > > >> where the pronoun "his" can have a neuter sense rather than masculine, > > >> and this is one of those cases. Politically correct pundits are > trying > > >> to eradicate that usage, but personally, I'm still of the opinion that > > >> "his" looks better than "his/hers", as long as you understand that the > > >> usage is not locking down the gender of the antecedent. > > > > > > The long-standing gender-neutral pronoun in English is singular > "their," > > > > > > as used by such people as Jane Austen. I would rewrite the sentence > as: > > > "The developer expresses the recipe to build their package in a > > > Makefile" > > > > A pedant would claim that it mixes singular and plural, but you are > > correct that it is in common enough usage that "their package" doesn't > > grate as badly on my nerves as "his/her package". > > his/her is indeed garbage > -mike >
