On May 14, 2009, at 11:18 AM, J. Landman Gay wrote:
Lynn Fredricks wrote:
And here I am going on about var naming conventions. I now
propose we
have a user naming convention as in mJim and fJacque for male or
female. ;-)
I used to use plain "Jacque" in my signature, and everyone
thought I was a man, which is the primary reason I changed it
to "Jacqueline". This was way back in the days of bulletin
boards, before the web was invented, and it was interesting
to see how people's responses changed when they found out I
was female. At the time, women programmers were almost
unheard of. I let them think I was male for almost a year
before I dropped the bomb. The double-takes were amusing.
I completely understand :-)
I thought of you. :) I still have to figure out Shao Sean. The only
thing I remember is that his/her name is backward to Western
conventions. English needs a non-gender human pronoun.
Often you can just use "they", when the person referred to is
unspecified, as in "If the user gets confused they can contact tech
support." (This usage is cropping up more and more in English, and
reportedly there are even examples of it in Shakespeare.) But there is
no good solution when you're referring to a specific, named person.
Maybe we need to borrow from German "man" or Polish "pan":
"Ask Robin. Man knows what man's doing." (Hmmmm. Doesn't exactly solve
the gender-neutral thing, does it.)
I'll go ask my friend Dana. Pan's a linguist.
:-)
Devin
Devin Asay
Humanities Technology and Research Support Center
Brigham Young University
_______________________________________________
use-revolution mailing list
[email protected]
Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription
preferences:
http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
