Path: csiph.com!v102.xanadu-bbs.net!xanadu-bbs.net!news.glorb.com!border3.nntp.dca.giganews.com!Xl.tags.giganews.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!local2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.earthlink.com!news.earthlink.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 08 Jan 2013 16:14:31 -0600 Date: Tue, 08 Jan 2013 14:14:31 -0800 From: Patricia Shanahan User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/17.0 Thunderbird/17.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer Subject: Re: java software naming question References: <396e3ff0-2a44-4d8b-917c-3b9205a567a6@googlegroups.com> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <__OdnU7WI-raB3HNnZ2dnUVZ_sidnZ2d@earthlink.com> Lines: 22 X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com NNTP-Posting-Host: 70.230.205.210 X-Trace: sv3-bEdyIzteEG7lZ88Soue3fR3BTX0G415EFUkbdcxkW0RpGJO3OZeK8MLmQUQMunrSXzZVzs9t7cvnTNw!NFzIZRn+pKa+0CTgKgY/T1iJfHeoYunpPn5xe7Hpcrzuwojh8eZPILqJNzHmWh9yzohtOAetUTxO!D2qBBJX/HYNihCZf6kuuxQG37qCIIHj7/efPqGutZSO1H4E= X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 X-Original-Bytes: 2274 Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.java.programmer:21223 On 1/8/2013 8:47 AM, Gene Wirchenko wrote: > On Tue, 08 Jan 2013 00:22:41 -0800, Roedy Green .. >> English is beginning to use "they" as a singular gender-unspecified >> pronoun. Unless some replacement singular catches on, the number > > It has been used for centuries. Also, I distinctly remember being taught in school not to use "they" for gender-neutral singular. Native speakers of a language learn its real rules as infants. For example, consider the subject-verb-object order of a typical English declarative sentence. I didn't need to be taught it in school. I did have to learn that Latin has a different default order. Rules native speakers only learn in school are very fragile. If schools stopped teaching people not to use "they" for gender-neutral singular it would become the norm in at most a generation. Patricia