FerretBrain

at 11:00 on 28-07-2010 link I find the best way to think about it is to treat the game as a hobby in and of itself, rather than as one single video game. It's not something you play to the end and then are done with, it's something you do a little bit of every day, or every couple of days. It's like that old joke: "What did you learn at school today dear?" "Not enough, I have to go back tomorrow."

at 15:09 on 27-07-2010 link

I lack strong feelings about Joss Whedon, but I think maybe some people around here have some? This person here has explained how they* feel about him using a comic and metaphorical puppies

To extend the metaphor, the problem is compounded by the fact that Joss-Whedon-Puppy has a huge fanbase who insists that Joss-Whedon-Puppy never does any normal puppy things *ever*. And says ...

at 22:02 on 26-07-2010 link

I just yesterday got around to reading that article on the use of singular “they” and feeling rather uncomfortable because, yes, I do in fact take issue with that quote from C. S. Lewis at the beginning of the post. “as everybody ought to do who falls into deep water”? That's a terrible construction, regardless of whether it's grammatically correct, which I d...

at 15:11 on 26-07-2010 link XKCD today makes an old, tired joke but I still found it rather funny

at 19:03 on 23-07-2010 link

The tool isn't the pronoun, the tool is the distinction between singular and plural pronouns. Which would inevitably be discarded by using 'they' routinely as a singular pronoun.

Except, as the article points out, "they" has been widely used as a singular pronoun for over four hundred years. Yet the English Language, and speakers of English, are still eminently capable of distinguishing between singular and plural.

I say (1) routinely using 't...

at 19:30 on 22-07-2010 link

The fact that other ambiguities sometimes occur is irrelevant. The two variants of my sentence that you offer, Dan, only show that English lacks certain tools. It has only one singular third-person feminine pronoun and only one plural third-person pronoun. Therefore it cannot use pronouns to resolve the ambiguities in those sentences, and they have to be resolved by more extensive re-writing.

Except it's not "other ambiguities" it's "the same ambiguity". The amb...

at 17:08 on 22-07-2010 link How is that more ambiguous than: "The doctor said she would be back at two. The patient waited, trying not to let herself think about what she would say when she came back. She wasn't even sure she understood what she'd already said to her." Or for that matter "The doctors said they would be back at two. The patients waited trying not to let themselves think about what they would say when they came back. They weren't even sure they understood what they'd already said to them."<br/...

at 15:20 on 22-07-2010 link

But there's also a more mundane level of operation where the purpose of genderless pronouns is to respect the identities of actual human beings who don't want to be gendered by language

Although of course one also needs to respect the identities of people who *do* want to be gendered by language. Which is where it all gets very complex.

at 14:54 on 22-07-2010 link

The point of language is to communicate, and in general using what pendants call 'correct' grammar (and the rest of us might call 'traditional' or 'standard' or 'orthodox' grammar) is an aid to communication

This is partially true. The bits of grammar that are important are the bits that literally everybody knows and nobody ever makes mistakes about except for non-native speakers. Nobody ever "accidentally" says "the mat sat on the cat" or "mat cat on sat the" ins...

at 10:19 on 22-07-2010 link I particularly like: The only problem with this view is that all you’ve managed to learn about English is how to get your brain to release some satisfying endorphins every time you blindly regurgitate some authority figure’s unjustified assertion. I'm totally going to use that.

at 23:00 on 21-07-2010 link I absolutely hate grammar pedants.

at 22:07 on 21-07-2010 link Actually I'm saying pretty much the opposite. The reason using ungendered pronouns works is because they highlight the fact that the use of gendered pronouns masks a lot of unconscious sexist assumptions. When we say "he" to mean "an unspecified person of either gender" we are, in fact, assuming that the unspecified person is male. If you say "zie" (which is the version I've heard) then it stands out, and confronts you with the fact that you're making assumptions. The problem is that if th...

at 17:05 on 21-07-2010 link As a way of fiddling with pronouns, I can see the sense of it, although personally I'm not sold on genderless pronouns. I kind of think they only work because they feel unnatural, if you see what I mean.

at 11:55 on 20-07-2010 link It's striking, but it's striking in the wrong way. It's striking because all the names get swapped around for poorly chosen equivalents, and because it makes mistakes. If you look at for example this rather amusing thing I found recently the effect of the regendering is far more subtle (and arguably more effective, since it actually catches the things it's supposed to be catching in the first place)...

at 23:57 on 19-07-2010 link Except, as Jamie points out, it's not really trying to be fun so much as to make a serious point about gendered language, the problem being that the point is undermined if it incorrectly diagnoses entirely neutral terms as gendered. Ironically it winds up doing exactly what people *claim* that people who object to gendered language want to do - replace everything that even sounds gendered with something clearly silly. It's not using gendered language to say that rabbits live in a Warren, or eat a D...

at 23:44 on 19-07-2010 link ... also, it has trouble distinguishing the possessive "her" from the pronoun "her".