I’d support this entirely, were it not for the bit
“Casual use of masculine and/or heteronormative examples in posts and comments that aren’t explicitly about gender. It’s just not that hard to come up with an unsexed example. Be especially careful when using the second person. If you need to use an example with a gender, there’s no reason to consider male the default—consider choosing randomly, or you could use a real person as an example (who isn’t presumed to archetypically represent anyone in the audience) instead of a hypothetical one (who might be).”
English evolved in a time period, predominatly ruled over by men. Hence, the default term is: “Mankind”, “Man”, and the default, when gender is uncertain, is to use “Man”, “Him”, or derivatives of such.
The others I can support. Objectification of anyone is an insult to thier intelligence, heck, even thier sapience. Sweeping generalizations about anyone are just that. Generalizations. Just as statistics are meaningless when applied on an individual level, so are generalizations, and men, please support me in this when I say: True pick up ‘artists’ know that each woman is a unique challange in and of herself. There may be certain techniques that may affect a large slice of the demographic, but even then, if you attempt to apply them without extensive knowledge of the subject, more often than not, you fall flat on your face. Even peeling oranges cannot always be done in the exact same manner, and women are far, [b]far[/b] more complex than mere fruit. Any who challange this, I respond with a challange of my own. Choose a pick up line. Any line at all. Go to a diverse number of clubs on multiple nights, and try it on enough women to provide statistical rigor, then come back here and try to tell me that it has a success margin wide enough to even be [i]considered.[/i]
English evolved in a time period, predominatly ruled over by men. Hence, the default term is: “Mankind”, “Man”, and the default, when gender is uncertain, is to use “Man”, “Him”, or derivatives of such.
In Old English, the word “man” was gender-neutral, while the words for male and female were something like wer and wif. The compound word wifman, meaning “female human” is what evolved into the modern word “woman” (interestingly, the word wer survives most commonly in “werewolf”, which as you can see literally means man-wolf, and distinctly male). Cognates of “man”, such as the German Mensch in fact remain gender neutral.
The gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun is “they”, with documented use at least as far back as Chaucer and Shakespeare.
And even ignoring that, “English was like this” is no reason for it to continue to be like that if the alternative is perfectly understandable. Languages change all the time for all kinds of reasons; we don’t use the complex system of verb tenses from Old English, or hither, thither and wither, or yon and yonder, (etc.), so why should we feel obligated to use its pronouns? (side note: which were not the same as modern English pronouns; “you” used to be a second person plural object only, it was thee and thou singular and ye and you plural.)
But yes, “man” used to be gender neutral, and for most of the history of English “they” was the gender neutral third person singular.
My apologies then, I was unaware of such. I lacked documentation, but had read in multiple sources (that memory fails to be exact about) that the roots were masculine, hence the comment.
I’d support this entirely, were it not for the bit
“Casual use of masculine and/or heteronormative examples in posts and comments that aren’t explicitly about gender. It’s just not that hard to come up with an unsexed example. Be especially careful when using the second person. If you need to use an example with a gender, there’s no reason to consider male the default—consider choosing randomly, or you could use a real person as an example (who isn’t presumed to archetypically represent anyone in the audience) instead of a hypothetical one (who might be).”
English evolved in a time period, predominatly ruled over by men. Hence, the default term is: “Mankind”, “Man”, and the default, when gender is uncertain, is to use “Man”, “Him”, or derivatives of such.
The others I can support. Objectification of anyone is an insult to thier intelligence, heck, even thier sapience. Sweeping generalizations about anyone are just that. Generalizations. Just as statistics are meaningless when applied on an individual level, so are generalizations, and men, please support me in this when I say: True pick up ‘artists’ know that each woman is a unique challange in and of herself. There may be certain techniques that may affect a large slice of the demographic, but even then, if you attempt to apply them without extensive knowledge of the subject, more often than not, you fall flat on your face. Even peeling oranges cannot always be done in the exact same manner, and women are far, [b]far[/b] more complex than mere fruit. Any who challange this, I respond with a challange of my own. Choose a pick up line. Any line at all. Go to a diverse number of clubs on multiple nights, and try it on enough women to provide statistical rigor, then come back here and try to tell me that it has a success margin wide enough to even be [i]considered.[/i]
In Old English, the word “man” was gender-neutral, while the words for male and female were something like wer and wif. The compound word wifman, meaning “female human” is what evolved into the modern word “woman” (interestingly, the word wer survives most commonly in “werewolf”, which as you can see literally means man-wolf, and distinctly male). Cognates of “man”, such as the German Mensch in fact remain gender neutral.
The gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun is “they”, with documented use at least as far back as Chaucer and Shakespeare.
And even ignoring that, “English was like this” is no reason for it to continue to be like that if the alternative is perfectly understandable. Languages change all the time for all kinds of reasons; we don’t use the complex system of verb tenses from Old English, or hither, thither and wither, or yon and yonder, (etc.), so why should we feel obligated to use its pronouns? (side note: which were not the same as modern English pronouns; “you” used to be a second person plural object only, it was thee and thou singular and ye and you plural.)
But yes, “man” used to be gender neutral, and for most of the history of English “they” was the gender neutral third person singular.
My apologies then, I was unaware of such. I lacked documentation, but had read in multiple sources (that memory fails to be exact about) that the roots were masculine, hence the comment.
Downvoted for unsupported folk etymology. See SoullessAutomaton’s comment.