They/Them

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English is so inconsistent at this point.

At this point? At this very point, specifically due to the historically valid usage of one gender neutral pronoun? Now is the time that it's finally become an inconsistent language? Singular "they" is the thing that has pushed English over the edge from logical and sensical to arbitrary and confusing? Of all the foibles and quirks, this is the one that is simply unforgivable and must be changed?

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Oh yeah it took me a while to default to 'they' instead of 'he/she' lol
Sometimes I still mess up and assume, and sometimes I say 'they' when I don't mean to also. Brains are weird.

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Calling people what they ask to be called just doesn't have to be this difficult.

Yeah, I don't really understand why people get so upset about Drag specifically, like it's not that hard once you figure it out.

CarrotsHaveEars

I didn't say anything you said.

I think a more sensible way to include LGBT+ group is to just make "she/her" obsolete. We are all "he/him", and we are "they/them" when in a group. Way cleaner than this, excuse me, shit that we foreign English speakers have to adjust to for every few years.

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me copy pasting a line of code in 20 different places just to go back and make a function for it

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naw bro I get chopsticks on amazon

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because not everyone is terminally online.

LGBT people exist irl too, you'd be surprised how many there are once you get to know them. People you never would've thought were lgbt you can now recognize. I'm from Florida which is pretty conservative and I know 5+ trans people (including non-binary).

They're pretty cool too! I have a trans guy friend who will absolutely LOVE to talk about how cars work and fishing spots given the chance. He taught me how to change the oil on my car. I'm hoping to get him a blahaj for Christmas

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Calling people what they ask to be called just doesn't have to be this difficult.

We in fact do it all the time. It's just people have gotten used to using names. But it's not like you were born with a Dave chromosome. Your parents decided to call you Dave, so in the end it's also just a made up name/sound.

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We agree. We make he/him obsolete and we're all she/her.

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The singular "they"
Pre-dates singular "you"

The same way rights were ore-dated by no rights?

'older' is not always 'better'. Make your point, but don't hinge it on a false comparison.

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Tea hers didn't know vapid influencers would exist.

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On the internet nobody knows you are a horse.

merde alors

"he/him" probably isn't he/him in their non-gendered language. In some languages there's no he or she, there's only a pronoun that means "that person"

Armenian, Persian, Tagalog, Finnish, Georgian, Turkish &c

Skua

Other commenters have already covered the you/thou thing, so to cover the printing press bit: that did happen, but with a different word. "Ye" as in "Ye Olde Village Inn" is the one. The "ye" here is "the", and it was pronounced as "the" too. It would have been spelled "þe" before, and in blackletter style (𝔱𝔥𝔦𝔰 𝔰𝔱𝔶𝔩𝔢 𝔬𝔣 𝔩𝔢𝔱𝔱𝔢𝔯𝔦𝔫𝔤), "y" and "þ" looked awfully similar. If your press came from a country that didn't use the thorn - and many presses in Europe did - and therefore didn't have that character available, then you'd just use the y since they were close enough anyway

A similar thing happened with the letter yogh (ȝ) in Scotland. It wasn't in most presses, but it looks close enough to a z, so just use a z, and now the name "Menzies" is spelled that way despite being pronounced "ming-iss"

That this "ye" is spelled the same way as the second person plural subject pronoun "ye" is a total coincidence

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Yeah it can take a while to get used to, especially if you knew the person before they changed their pronouns. But the point is it isnt incompatible with our language at all. I think the last panel would be better if it showed the (transphobic) guy and another person and he says "this activist said the craziest thing to me today" and then the second person says "oh yeah, what'd THEY say" because then the 'they' pronoun would be directly referring to the person who wanted to be called 'they' in the first place.

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Mate, english is my second language too and this is not that confusing.

Singular they/them has been here for hundreds of years and using it as a gender neutral alternative to she/her and he/him isnt shit, its part of the english language.

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The "terminally online" aspect is the obsession with pronouns, which doesn't seem to exist in reality.

I know quite a few LGBT people and even work with someone who is trans. None of them have ever once mentioned anything about pronouns. Because we just conversed like normal people.

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Also singular they is older than singular you. So any idiots who complain that "they" should only be plural should only be using thou/thee for second person singular.

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"I was with Dan (they/them) and Steve (he/him) the other day. They forgot a poster they needed and went back to the car to get it."

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it is fairly common to use the third person pronoun of someone during a group conversation, even while they are there

But is improper to do so. The proper way to refer to a person who is present is by using their name.