They/Them

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You're not going to bother to point out the fault in my logic?

Skua

If the Dan in your example used he/him pronouns and so did Steve, then it is equally unclear

"I was with Dan (he/him) and Steve (he/him) the other day. He hadn't brought a poster they needed and went back to the car to get it."

There's no way to know whether the "he" is Dan or Steve. The they/them pronoun isn't the problem in your example, the structure of the sentence is.

Skua

"Can't believe how close we came to an accident on the way here. We were walking past a building with some scaffolding on it, and a brick just about hit me on the head. Fergus was looking up at the site anyway because Fergus's company is advertising on the site, so Fergus saw it fall and stopped me just on time."

Nobody talks like this

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I’m joining in the “this blew my mind” sentiment and just want to say thanks for sharing this tidbit of info.

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We use ты for second person singular.

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No, it's just been a thing forever, and will always be thing. Those teachers, if they ever existed which I doubt, were just dumb fucks from Dumbfuckistan.

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Stop. You are making some of the senseless things in English make sense. How I’m I supposed to feel superior because my first language is read the way it is written?

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If you're with Dan (they/them) and Dan (he/him), you would also have the problem when saying

"I was with Dan and Dan the other day. Dan hadn't brought the poster, so Dan went back to the car to get it."

So to avoud confusion, people should not be allowed to be called Dan anymore. In fact everyone gets a UUID so there is no more confusion.

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Yeah but that's because you see it in archaic contexts. How do you feel about 'thou art tall'?

lad

I, too, thought about Drag several times while reading the thread

lad

please invent some word for it and go with it

There is are more than one word. It's going to take quite some time until agreement on the use will distill and become accepted, though.

lad

There's more than one option, I for one prefer Elverson which is Ey/Em/Eirs

lad

That's true, but you can't help but notice that when people coming from this background are taught English, they are usually taught that 'male' pronouns are the default.

If anything, I would support the removal of 'he/him' for all the backlash it will generate.

merde alors

in france "they" invented "iel", a gender neutral pronoun, to replace "il" and "elle". Young people (some?) adopted it rapidly and were using it naturally but the state banned the use of "inclusive language" on all official communications (which includes schools)

i remember thinking that inventing a new pronoun, like they did, was a better solution than choosing one of the two as gender neutral

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That's because "is" is the third person conjugation of Be, not the second. Of course it sounds weird.

"Thou are", and the actually correct "thou art" both feel much more natural.

Flying Squid

I'm 47 and it just came naturally to me.

"They" made more sense to me than "it" in the first place.

Come to think of it, I still call babies "it" when I don't know the gender all the time though.

Flying Squid

While we're oversharing, I had a similar issue:

I had bad asthma as a kid and stress would bring on an asthma attack. An inhaler wasn't enough, I had to go to the nurse and use this loud, ugly machine called a nebulizer. Obviously, one of the most stressful times in school is during a test, so taking a test could easily trigger an attack. Teachers always begrudgingly wrote me a pass to the nurse and made it clear to me that they "knew" I was faking to get out of the test.

Not one of them got the idea into their heads to just make me take the test with me. I would have been able to take it just fine while breathing through the stupid nebulizer. It's not like I enjoyed being hooked up to the damn thing or enjoyed not being able to breathe well.

lad

Outright banned, I'm guessing because blindly following rules by the book, but I think it's not a move in the right direction.

In Spain people are trying to make neutral words by placing @ where a/o should go in the gendered words, I think it never made to any documentation but it wasn't banned yet, at least.

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jesus

that sounds awful.

I love how teachers take it personally that you don't want to do mandatory work lol. anyway. glad you made it out of there.

Flying Squid

Me too. Thanks.