On Sat, 2011-03-05 at 03:27 +1100, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > Westley Martínez wrote: > > On Fri, 2011-03-04 at 00:54 -0800, Aaron DeVore wrote: > >> On Thu, Mar 3, 2011 at 11:44 PM, Kerrick Staley <m...@kerrickstaley.com> > >> wrote: > >>> That way, if the sysadmin does decide to replace the installed "python" > >>> file, he can do so without inadvertently deleting the previously > >>> installed binary. > >> Nit pick: Change "he" to "they" to be gender neutral. > > > > Nit pick: Change "they" to "he" to be grammatically correct. If we > > really have to be gender neutral, change "he" to "he or she". > > Actually, that's a hyper-correction imposed by grammarians in the 18th > century who were overly influenced by Latin. The use of "they" as a > generic singular and indeterminate pronoun in written English goes back > at least to Chaucer in the 14th century, and very likely as long back as > before English was English, and remains in common use today. Despite the > distaste for it among (mostly American) grammarians, it is > linguistically sound and widely accepted in most of the English-speaking > world, particularly England itself. The use of singular they is > widespread, natural, and grammatically correct. > > http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-the2.htm > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they > http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archivs/005423.html > > But for the sake of not upsetting our nuclear-armed cousins on the wrong > side of the Atlantic *wink*, perhaps the sentence could be reworded to > refer to system administrators plural, and thus satisfy everyone? > > "That way, if sysadmins decide to replace the installed "python" file, > they can do so without inadvertently deleting the previously installed > binary." > >
All right I have to reply to all these "singular they" remarks. Just because the singular they has been used for a long time doesn't make it right. It sounds unnatural, at least to me, and I've always been taught to use "he or she" which I despise. So all my life I've used the generic "he". Anyways, I remember reading somewhere that for Python Strunk and White apply, and neither Strunk nor White like singular theys. _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
