• @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    21 year ago

    Thank you. This explained how pronouns would be used, at first I always imagined you would be taking to “jim”, bur after reading I could see where you may be telling a story about “Jim” to others as a third party. I know that sounds dumb, but I never claimed to be smart.

    I appreciate you taking the effort to comment instead of just downvoting like some others.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      11 year ago

      Not a problem. People don’t usually think about pronouns. We could circumvent a lot of confusion if there were an agreeable gender-neutral pronoun in English… But people have gone back and forth about the only one we have (“they”) enough that it rubs both sides wrong. Gendering a person in a sentence rarely disambiguates… it only maters if you have a conversation with exactly 1 male and female subject and ZERO genderable objects.

      A man and a woman sitting in a boat, for example, and “her” still might be ambiguous.