SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Kids as young as 7 are finding ingenious ways around Apple's screen time controls:
[...] Parents can use the feature to impose restrictions on their children's device usage — or so they thought. One Reddit shared the story of how their seven-year-old had gamed the feature, sparking a chat that has nearly 500 comments.
"When iOS 12 came out I limited my 7-year old son's screen time through the family share. For a few days I felt like he was playing a bit more than he should, but I couldn't figure out why," u/PropellerGuy said.
"Finally today, my son revealed his hack: When he runs out of screen time and his games get locked, he heads to App Store, downloads a previously installed (but later removed) game through the cloud icon, and it works without limitations!"
"What can I say," they added. "I'm not even mad. That's impressive."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Thursday September 27 2018, @05:05AM (12 children)
Unless PropellerGuy is a group of some sort, that's just plain wrong. It's so wrong I can't imagine a native English speaker with a positive IQ not flagging it as defective.
So I'm not disagreeing with you, exactly, but you're leaving waaay too much out.
If the concern is to avoid 'misgendering' then allow me to suggest some grammatically sound alternatives. And I'm going to change the name, from 'PropellerGuy' which arguably implies that the poster is a dude, to a handle that implies no such thing, just so we can separate that issue out.
So, let's say the handle is 'Alex.' There's a nice androgynous name, could be short for Alexander, or for Alexandra.
The shortest and simplest way to phrase this would be simply
"What can I say," he added.
And this is technically correct, whether he's Alexander or Alexandra - contrary to currently popular mythology, English isn't a gendered language, there is no grammatical requirement to match anything by gender, and in fact it's utterly impossible to do so consistently (since English isn't actually a gendered language, this should be no surprise.)
Historically speaking, the 'male' forms are not male forms at all, they're simply unmarked forms. For example "he" from *hiz just means 'that one.' *Hiz is proto-germanic, that WAS a gendered language, but we don't actually use the feminine marked form of *hiz very often today - it's 'hon' as in 'honey' and that's a discouraged mode of address these days. We use 'she' which is a really interesting word, formed by consciously altering the Old English male form, adding that distinctive buzz at the beginning to form an honorific pronoun.
Similarly, while 'man' is a very old word nearly unchanged in pronunciation (*mon-) and in meaning (a human being) from thousands of years ago; woman is another peculiar Old English coining, from 'wyfman' i.e. 'wife-man.' Another honorific coined at the time that the grammatical gender was being lost. A special form that only a female could receive.
So grammatically speaking, "he" is simply the unmarked third person singular safe to use for any human, "man" is the noun for an adult human, and the safest bet is to stick with them.
"What can I say," he added.
Ahhh but grammar is not the only consideration is it? These "female" forms are not grammatical gender, but they are a record and a warning that females expect to be treated special regardless. Call a female 'he' and you do run the risk of offending her grievously; your perfect grammar is not likely to be a solid defense against that.
So then the logical path is to only use the female forms. When in doubt use 'she' and 'woman.' If the referent is a male, then your usage is arguably incorrect - but he's less likely to be upset about it, and even if he is, he's much more likely to get over it without causing you a lot of pain. So that makes sense too.
"What can I say," she added.
I'll mention that I often use 'she' in generic or unknown spots, but it's from old habit, not from grammar. It was an old habit, from before I understood the history of the words, from a simple desire to balance what I had been told and mistakenly believed was an actual gender imbalance. But even though the origin is obsolete, I feel no need at all to break the habit - there's no reason not to assume the hypothetical individual in virtually any example might not be female, and the case for it being incorrect to call a male 'she' is paper thin as well - again English is not a gendered language.
So I'm ok with that alternative too.
"What can I say," was added.
Yeah, can't drop that one in directly and have it work well, but if you rewrite the paragraph to suit the chosen phrasing this can be done. The criticism I would have is just that passive phrasing is generally something to avoid when you can, it sounds bad in most situations, it can project a reluctance to say what you mean; but if you REALLY want to be grammatically correct and you REALLY want to avoid all possible policor fallout, then this could easily be worth the cost.
"What can I say," added Alex.
And THIS is your best all around answer. Admittedly it works slightly better in my altered example than the original, because I chose a shorter handle, but man computers have this great thing called copy and paste, so it doesn't really even matter. It's grammatically correct, and it runs absolutely no risk of being mistakenly taken as some sort of gender-based offensiveness.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 27 2018, @05:34AM (1 child)
I was CALLED OUT for misgendering, after using somebody's NAME [youtu.be].
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday September 27 2018, @05:51AM
If I read the beginning correctly, this is some kind of feud between folks that are basically aligned; because the trans-girl thought the girly-boy was conspicuously overusing her name because he wasn't sure which pronouns she wanted? Doesn't seem too important really.
If you can force your detractors to drop to such an extreme level of ridiculosity to stay hostile you've just about won the battle already.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 27 2018, @07:34AM (1 child)
That's not how language works.
Language, as you may or may not know, evolves. What is "wrong" at one point in time may not be "wrong" at another point in time. The word "they" has been used as a gender-neutral singular pronoun for quite some time now.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 27 2018, @03:18PM
Yes, it's been correct for several centuries, so it's about time it was wrong for a change.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kiffer on Thursday September 27 2018, @10:50AM
Wow... that's nice wall of text you've got there.
But... "they" is also perfectly valid usage in a number of English dialects.
So, having done loads of work to explain that "everyone should be totally fine with 'he' as a gender neutral pronoun" you're still left with the simple fact that 'they' is normal*, common, non-recent, and grammatically acceptable usage.
*oh, it's not normal in your Local English Variant?
It is in mine, and has been since I was a child in the 1980s,
it not some new politically correct thing.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by urza9814 on Thursday September 27 2018, @11:35AM (6 children)
The singular 'they' is so old it was accepted by friggin' SHAKESPEARE. You're nearly a thousand years too late if you want to be fighting that particular battle. Give it up already.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Thursday September 27 2018, @01:18PM (5 children)
Shakespeare uses 'they' but not truly in simple singular sense, not like what we see above here.
You might be thinking of
"There's not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friend "
At a glance you might expect *his instead of their right? Man/his rather than man/they.
But look again. The referent 'they' points to here is not the word 'man' it's the nominal *phrase* in the first verse, and that is no simple singular subject. The sense of they here is still plural - the actual subject is not a single man, but every man of the town!
"They" in this context is not incorrect, and the combination of plural with singular is done for a purpose - it gives the sense of successive plurality, something very much like a for loop. He's not being saluted by all the men together, but he is saluted by each in turn.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 27 2018, @03:35PM (1 child)
I mean, it's right there in the phrase "every man".
That's why Shakespeare was wrong. As the AC pointed already [soylentnews.org]: Shakespeare fell prey to a heuristics failure (if not a desire to produce a certain artistic, rather than logical, sequence of syllables).
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday September 27 2018, @07:26PM
Now, I suspect I know where you got this idea. You're thinking back to your grade school sentence diagrams, right?
So what I suspect happened is you got the part about how you could break down nominal phrases, strip away the phrase and just match the noun. And normally that works, it's probably the appropriate level to be going over in your 3rd grade English class. But it is an oversimplification, because English is a language that has nominal phrases that just don't work that way. All of the examples in this thread are examples of that.
You're looking at a nominative phrase that uses the unmarked bare noun but is still clearly plural semantically. And there's ample evidence that English allows and has long allowed for the use of a plural pronoun to refer to a phrase like that, as is always pointed out when I say you can't use 'they' as a singular pronoun.
That's missing the point. I didn't deny you could use it with a plural object, the entire POINT is to use it with plural objects, not singular.
The usage being criticized, from TFA, used 'they' to refer to "\PropellerGuy" and we have zero indication of any kind that he's actually a collective or a large abstract set of people rather than being a single individual, so it's not the same thing at all as what you see Shakespeare doing.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 27 2018, @03:55PM (2 children)
If you don't like Shakeſpere, how about period bible translations, say the KJV (James 2:15-16, original 1611 version)?
Or Tyndale's (not sure which revision this is, but 1530ish)?
Hey, we can go right back to Wycliffe (Purvey's 1395 revision), if you're down with Middle English:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 27 2018, @04:51PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 28 2018, @12:19AM
A brother or a sister -- one person. That's unambiguously a singular subject. Not a brother and a sister, or every brother and sister in town one by one.