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The Most Futuristic Predictions that Came True in 2014

posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday April 14 2015, @05:33PM   
from the wold-of-tomorrow dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

io9 reports:

As 2014 comes to a close, it's time to reflect on the most futuristic breakthroughs and developments of the past year. This year's crop features a slew of incredible technological, scientific, and social achievements, from mind-to-mind communication to self-guiding sniper bullets. Here are 15 predictions that came true in 2014.

It's a bit deep into 2015 for a 2014 round-up, but there are some in their list you may not have heard of.

• Re:gender-neutral pronouns (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday April 15 2015, @07:51AM

  by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Wednesday April 15 2015, @07:51AM (#170831) Homepage

  Singular they is as more well entrenched in educated use of the language than most of the spellings of words you're using. Austen is most often cited as a user of it, perhaps because of her gender, perhaps she used it more, I don't know, but you'll also find it in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Thackeray, Shaw, etc..
  
  If you don't cringe every time the plural /you/ is used to refer to a singular entity, then you have no right to object to /they/. The second person singular personal pronoun was historically /thou/. /You/ was just a, presumably French-influenced, politically correct polite coinage where you use the plural to make the subject feel more important. And it stuck.
  
  And as nobody else has pointed it out, we already have another a gender-free third person singular personal pronoun - /one/, but again that's fallen mostly into disuse, and is now used in contexts more akin to that of an over-polite second person pronoun.
  
  Personally, I think artificially dicking with language is dumb. I live in a country with no gendered pronouns, and those I know with only moderate English skills often call me 'she' or 'her', and my g/f 'he' or 'him', and we don't even bat an eyelid. The important part of the pronoun was to identify the person, which it does, and not the gender of that person. Someone with issues has not been more insulted by the use of their non-preferred pronoun any more than I would have, because it's not an insult, it's just that they like getting offended at nothing, and that's their problem. They presumably still have a messed-up belief in something Sapir-Whorf-like, which has been debunked many times by actual psycholinguists.

  --
  Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves

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