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Normal_Anomaly comments on Local Ordinances of Fun - Less Wrong
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Comments (153)
Armok means that he disagrees strongly with Eliezer on Fun Theory, and is/was worried that he would not at all enjoy a eutopia produced by human CEV that everyone else enjoyed. I know Armok means this because I talked to him IRL.
EDIT: pronouns changed from gender-neutral to "he" because apparently gender-neutral pronouns get on some people's nerves. Apologies to anyone I annoyed.
I've never been convinced that gender neutral pronouns actually fulfill the underlying function of language -- namely, to communicate. Especially with so many competing standards. Personally, I use the singular 'they.' I mean, yes, it's not technically correct, but people understand you.
And, after all, 'em eir ey' aren't technically correct either. On account of not being words.
I have mellowed in the last year or so. I no longer downvote every comment that uses that kind of language. They no longer have the same close ties with an abhorrent (local) political agenda so I can now consider them more or less acceptable.
EDIT: Most unexpected significant and rapid downvoting of one of my comments ever. I retract it, including the downvote policy change - I have returned to considering the subject as distasteful politics.
Upvoted wedrifid because the original downvoting was weird and silly. I think the downvoting policy he returned to is similarly silly, but at least had a coherent motivation.
I must admit it is certainly the most whimsical of my downvoting policies.
Neologisms are still words.
EDIT: As wedrifid implies, words are strings of characters with socially established meanings. Just because he doesn't belong to the social group that uses those words to mean those things doesn't mean they stop being words. It'd be like saying {klama} isn't a word merely because only around a thousand people or so have ever used it to mean "go/come."
Sure, ok. "Not words in this particular established language". Arglebargle witzot phlerg.
You mis-spelled "flerg".
Must have missed my edit where I explicitly mentioned social groups. Also, see Wittgenstein's comments on private language.
No. Nor is that conclusion suggested by my reply.
What was your reply supposed to suggest?
Ok, my reception-of-comment predictions are way off now. I expected the parent comment to end up more downvoted after the preceding edit, not less (it expressed intention to follow a voting strategy that some may not like for reasons that some would not follow). Instead it went from -5 to +4. Unfortunately the voting strategy mentioned (and the underlying preferences) actually relies on my model of people's motivations when using "ey"s. Since my model of behavior patterns in the context are unreliable my strategy in responding is not clear. I'll have to go by whim and intuition on a case by case basis!
Disclaimer: I'm strongly in favor of gender neutral language. I do personally use Singular They because it's the least obtrusive and most correct, but consider ey/eir/em to be a decent alternative (they feel like the most natural schelling point to me if you were going to pick a new word, and tend to be read as typos or completely glossed over during the interim period where they'll still gaining traction, whereas xir/zer/whatever just look weird)
In general I consider gender neutral language better than no gender neutral language even if obtrusive and have little sympathy for people who consider it obtrusive. Yes, it's a pet political peeve on mine that makes me okay with this, but it's pet political peeves of the pro-english-status-quo-folks that make it a remotely big deal in the first place.
Less Wrong is the one place where I'd consider altering this perspective, because we make a genuine effort not be political at all, and whether I like it or not, it IS a recurring consequence of gender neutral language that someone makes a big deal out of it. (Case in point, this thread)
I place most of the blame of this on the people complaining about it, but it is what it is. (I am personally annoyed whenever someone uses "He" to describe someone who turns out to be female or gender-nonconforming. I don't have a consistent policy on how to respond to that but I'd accept blame for arguments that happen because I made a big deal out of it).
But your downvoting seemed incredibly weird, especially without anyone clarifying why they did it in the first place. Pro-gender-neutral-folks shouldn't have downvoted you for having changed your policy. Pro-status-quo folks who are upset at you for "having mellowed" would a) strike me as INCREDIBLY ridiculous, b) really should have explained their motivations if they wanted to punish your defection in a meaningful way. So the downvoting was either dumb or deliberate trolling. Presumably the subsequent upvoting was by other people sympathetic to the unfairness of the situation.
(I successfully resisted explaining this in detail yesterday, trying to avoid contributing to the political-tangeant-splosion. At this point the political-tangeant-sposion's already happened and I figure I might as well explain myself).
I am persuaded. "Ey/eir/em" are Cool not-quite-words.
Analytical tangents are also cool. Your parent was not especially political - at in particular it was only directly in favor of the new words rather than abusing those words to push a different agenda. When divorced of any other connotations a simple word preference is not especially dramatic.
My best guess was that it was people trying to punish me for acknowledging that I formerly had that policy (and the usual two or three downvotes that I expect most of my comments to get from people I have pissed off recently - perhaps a couple from Clippy). But, as I noted, my model of human behavior in the context was completely broken so I had little confidence in that prediction.
I would have loved hearing that if that was the case.
It depends on what you mean by “technically correct”. It's been in use for at least four centuries.
Every time I see the word "ey", I can't help but think of Fonzie. Eyyyyyyy !
Anyway, I prefer using "he" or "she" as the gender-neutral pronoun, despite the fact that neither of these is actually gender-neutral. The singular "they" grates on my nerves like an unclosed bracket. I am probably in the minority on this, though.
Singular "they" has been around for centuries longer than you have; you may as well get used to it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
Lots of ideas have been around for centuries longer than myself, but this doesn't necessarily mean they are good ideas. Just to clarify, I did not mean to imply that the singular "they" is grammatically incorrect; merely that it is, in my personal and completely non-authoritative opinion, bad style.
You could choose to change your mind about that; and studying the actual history of the language might help.
Um, I don't want to change my mind just to change it, I want to change it to make my current beliefs less wrong (tm). I agree that studying the actual history of the language could help, but I'm more concerned with present-day usage as a practical matter, than with the historical perspective regarding the evolution of languages in general, and English in particular.
Whether it's a good idea to utter a particular sentence “as a practical matter” depends on what your listeners will think upon hearing it, which depends very much on what set of linguistic inputs they've been exposed to so far and very little about any purported stone tablets in the sky determining whether something is good style regardless of what any users of language do.
I wasn't talking about any kind of prescriptivist stone tablets, just my own preference. In my experience, which may not be representative, the gender of a person or people I'm talking about matters a lot less than the number of people, most of the time. Thus, sacrificing gender recognition fidelity is a good tradeoff, most of the time.
On the other hand, in English the number of people is usually already encoded in the antecedent of the pronoun, whereas whether the gender matters isn't usually encoded anywhere else.
You're going to need gender-neutral pronouns anyway, since not everyone is a man or a woman. Might as well use the same pronouns for people of unknown gender.
The difficulty of introducing new pronouns into English isn't just political reaction. Linguistically, pronouns are a closed word class in most European languages — unlike in, say, Japanese. Closed classes don't change much, unlike open classes such as nouns and (in English but not Japanese) verbs.
That said, there is apparently a strong and somewhat popular movement to adopt a gender-neutral pronoun in Swedish. Closed classes can be changed; it's just rare.
Whether verbs are a closed class in Japanese is largely a matter of perspective, I think. I'm pretty sure something like "janpusuru"(ジャンプする) is considered a single word. Am I wrong?
The claim that I've read and heard from linguists about this is that while words like janpusuru are semantically verbs, grammatically they are a noun janpu + the standard verb suru.
Contrast the English expression "I am doing homework" vs. "I am *homeworking". "Homework" isn't really used as a verb in English, but we can express the idea of homework-as-an-action by saying "do homework".
New non-suru verbs in Japanese do apparently happen from time to time (Wikipedia uses the example of guguru — "to google") but they're rare, so the class is mostly closed.
That makes good sense.
Why did you use such a pronoun in the first case, if you're talking about one specific person whose gender you know?
Presumably they didn't know Armok's gender at the time. (If they did I agree it's silly).
Alternately, perhaps they knew Armok's gender but not whether he'd chosen to disclose it to the group.
Confirming this. Also, I like gender-neutral pronouns and have seen them used on here before--I didn't think it would cause this much argument.
Confirming this.