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Gender pronouns in an email signature

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WelshBloke said:
Words have consistent and agreed upon meanings. If people just start changing those meanings or just start making up their own it damages the whole aim of the language.
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Words represent concepts, and our understanding those concepts can change over time. Trying to keep words static would, in fact, damage the whole aim of language.
 
JujuFish said:
Words represent concepts, and our understanding those concepts can change over time. Trying to keep words static would, in fact, damage the whole aim of language.
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Which is why you can use plenty of existing words to describe yourself if someone is interested enough in you to find out. Pronouns aren't for that.
 
WelshBloke said:
Which is why you can use plenty of existing words to describe yourself if someone is interested enough in you to find out. Pronouns aren't for that.
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If you imply you don't want to know a person's deep, personal story when you're just trying to refer to them, that is understandable. But when pronouns have gender, as many of them do, you're going to run into problems.

Personally, I have no issue with using 'they' as a singular neutral pronoun, just as 'you' was once only plural but has also become singular, but a lot of people don't like that.
 
JujuFish said:
But when pronouns have gender, as many of them do, you're going to run into problems.
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Lots of language is gendered, it's not trying to say anything deep and meaningful about you. That's just the way language works.

JujuFish said:
Personally, I have no issue with using 'they' as a singular neutral pronoun, just as 'you' was once only plural but has also become singular, but a lot of people don't like that.
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Its clumsy and ugly. If you want to do it that's up to you but we should strive to be elegant and graceful in the way we use language.
 
WelshBloke said:
Lots of language is gendered, it's not trying to say anything deep and meaningful about you. That's just the way language works.
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luckily the grammatical gender stuff got removed from english after the normans conquered, because giving gender to arbitrary genderless stuff is one of the dumbest features of many languages
 
WelshBloke said:
Why? It's just a way that the language works.
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because it needlessly assigns a gender to something that doesn't have one, making something pointless that you have to remember.

like in german - oh, chairs are masculine but couches are feminine? and i have to remember that in order to refer to them correctly? forget that noise.
 
I self identify as a hermaphroditic wombat and my pronouns are zlorp, zlook and zlunuum. I find the letter 'e' to be a micro-aggression towards me and while I'm allowed to use it others are not allowed to use it within earshot. It's OUR (hermaphroditic wombats) letter and only we can use it without it being offensive. I will happily accede to your inane gender/sexuality rules if you accede to mine, otherwise ah heck off. The end.
 
WelshBloke said:
Well they do in some languages.
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Notably Spanish. The word "the" changes depending on the gender of the object being referred to, "el" for masculine, "la" for feminine.

el libro, the book
el doctor, the doctor (even for female doctors)
el ano, the year

la casa the house
la persona, the person
la calle, the street

Edit: BTW, does the gender change depending on the whim of the object? Can el libro force people to refer to it as la libra if it's by Jane Austen or Judy Blume and self-identifies as female?
 
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yeah that's just a bizarre practice. thankfully english got rid of it between 1100 and 1500. maybe the best thing that came out of the norman conquest.

which is actually kind of interesting, because french had grammatical gender as well as anglo-saxon. some people think that when combining the languages there was a sort of collision (different genders for the same word depending on if it was norman or anglo-saxon). so it was easier to just drop the whole thing.
 
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We had people at my company do crazy shit with the sig very unprofessional shit. Executives gave me the green light to stanardize email sigs and it was glorious hearing the herd bitch about it. The best part the users could not see the sig in the email body, Exchange added it when it was sent.
 
OutHouse said:
We had people at my company do crazy shit with the sig very unprofessional shit. Executives gave me the green light to stanardize email sigs and it was glorious hearing the herd bitch about it. The best part the users could not see the sig in the email body, Exchange added it when it was sent.
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But how will people know I'm certified in Red Hat, yoga, and intermediate coffee grinding if I can't put it in my email sig?
 
WelshBloke said:
language
ˈlaŋɡwɪdʒ/
noun
  1. 1.
    the method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured and conventional way.

Your name is there to refer to you specifically. The pronoun is just there because the English language needs one, stop trying to use it for something it's not meant to be for.
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Eh, dictionaries are merely records of word use. They change from generation to generation, as do spellings (fuck you and your all-U-minium! 😀). Just spend some time with the OED, it's quite revealing.

Abjectly dumb, useless words simply become words because enough dumb people use them for enough years, to the point they reach population saturation and nothing can be done. Just how it is.

In my lifetime, "Irregardless" has officially become a word....what the fuck is up with that? It was never a word, it meets the exact same definition and word use of "regardless," and is only ever engaged by observably stupid people. Yet, it is essentially "a word," because it is widely adopted by universal English dictionaries. I will go to my grave never recognizing that as a word, and immediately judging people that use it, treating them like shit for as long as I know them, but it doesn't matter because I lost. I know that. That's simply how it works.
 
Chaotic42 said:
Weird. I've never seen that before. My signature at work is just name/title/org/email/phone.
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Because you work with the big boys that know how to not be clinically insane - and learned to grow up in life? You manage to do such meaningful tasks like put on pants in the morning Me too! Let's start a me too movement.
 
s0me0nesmind1 said:
Because you work with the big boys that know how to not be clinically insane - and learned to grow up in life? You manage to do such meaningful tasks like put on pants in the morning Me too! Let's start a me too movement.
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I put my pants on over my head one ear at a time just like everyone else.
 
On second thought this means that in the future (allegedly) i could be fined for forgetting someone's pronoun but not remembering their name is no big deal. LoL
 
zinfamous said:
In my lifetime, "Irregardless" has officially become a word....what the fuck is up with that? It was never a word, it meets the exact same definition and word use of "regardless," and is only ever engaged by observably stupid people. Yet, it is essentially "a word," because it is widely adopted by universal English dictionaries. I will go to my grave never recognizing that as a word, and immediately judging people that use it, treating them like shit for as long as I know them, but it doesn't matter because I lost. I know that. That's simply how it works.
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Irregardless of your stance, my position is that the correct way is irregardless. Thus when you are in my presence you must utilize irregardless, regardless of your stance on it or you will be fined.

😀
 
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