Gender [was: Re: Cancel a repeat with a button]

[Devin Asay]

On May 14, 2009, at 11:18 AM, J. Landman Gay wrote:

> Lynn Fredricks wrote:
>>>> And here I am going on about var naming conventions. I now
>>> propose we
>>>> have a user naming convention as in mJim and fJacque for male or
>>>> female. ;-)
>>> I used to use plain "Jacque" in my signature, and everyone
>>> thought I was a man, which is the primary reason I changed it
>>> to "Jacqueline". This was way back in the days of bulletin
>>> boards, before the web was invented, and it was interesting
>>> to see how people's responses changed when they found out I
>>> was female. At the time, women programmers were almost
>>> unheard of. I let them think I was male for almost a year
>>> before I dropped the bomb. The double-takes were amusing.
>>
>> I completely understand :-)
>
> I thought of you. :) I still have to figure out Shao Sean. The only
> thing I remember is that his/her name is backward to Western
> conventions. English needs a non-gender human pronoun.

Often you can just use "they", when the person referred to is  
unspecified, as in "If the user gets confused they can contact tech  
support." (This usage is cropping up more and more in English, and  
reportedly there are even examples of it in Shakespeare.) But there is  
no good solution when you're referring to a specific, named person.  
Maybe we need to borrow from German "man" or Polish "pan":

"Ask Robin. Man knows what man's doing." (Hmmmm. Doesn't exactly solve  
the gender-neutral thing, does it.)

I'll go ask my friend Dana. Pan's a linguist.

  :-)

Devin

Devin Asay
Humanities Technology and Research Support Center
Brigham Young University