With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Thread Fourteen)

Thank you, corrected.

 

Also, none of this is helped by the fact that they're all shapeshifters, and so you don't even have a guarantee that they'll always look the same. That's confusing enough on it's own.

 

...Whites are no longer prohibited from using it to engage in telekinetic ball-toss and…

Spoiler: Commentary spoilered for length

Odd hyphenation. Can't remember if this is normal for you.

Extraneous space after the Quotation mark.

Gee, sounds like a nice guy...

Perhaps they're communicating with their superiors.

This guy isn't the sharpest hoe in the farm, is he?

...As you said, you flew past this park hundreds of times without doing so..?"

That repetition is a little awkward, but it is an off-the-cuff speech...

If this is typical of the uprisings, I'm not surprised things are so... confused in general.

 

Thank you, corrected.

What's dumb about that? That's literally the most he can say for certain.

 

True. It's still an amusing response, given they just asked him about the succession arrangements. That one line gives a lot of character to this otherwise unremarkable-seeming NPC-tier fellow, the sort most players would ignore if he weren't confronting them.

Which is ironic, given that he seems to be inadvertently responsible for triggering the uprising in his city (from his perspective anyway.) Amazing how one little act of disobedience can snowball.

 

Wait... Is Grayven going to accidentally conquer Mars? Or at least get a position on the ruling council? Like, he wasn’t going to, but then stepped in to organize the government and got elected and went with it when he had the opportunity?

 

If he does, then he'll count it as a great personal failure.

 

Third-person pronouns suffer this same issue whether gendered or generic. At that point, one's supposed to state names more often to keep the subjects and objects straight.

I mean, I'm not trying to diss Zoat here, the coin toss bit was funny, but the moment you give up on assigning placeholder genders, why bother picking a gender at all? No one will correct you because third-person generic pronouns are a Mathematician's Answer.

 

Because as stated, the English language alternative is 'it', which actually is dehumanising. Also, the SI did the same thing when he went to Mars.

 

*shrug* Honestly I don't mind that personally. It's just the nature of the English language currently.

 

"General Kenobi"

"Suzerain of Earth" doesn't count?

 

Oh, this is gonna be fun.

 

Do you want anyone who backs that title to show up to confirm it?

 

Oh boy. This sounds like ominous foreshadowing.

Also, correction: "visibly starts".

(This isn't a correction, merely a discussion, and not specifically directed at Mr Zoat but rather continuing the thread.)

No, the English language alternative is "they". It only sounds weird if you stop to think about it; I daresay that if anyone here heard someone else use it they wouldn't even notice (unless they're the type to pedantically follow an artificial style guide that says to use "he" for persons of unknown gender). "Somebody lost their hat" sounds completely natural. As has already been mentioned, that usage has been attested as far back as the 1300s, and it's not like we don't already have singular personal pronouns that are plural in form -- "you" is grammatically plural and native English speakers don't have issues with that (or even consciously notice that it's true).

Earth doesn't have a ruling council, and the closest thing it has doesn't recognize that title in any official capacity.

 

There are other alternatives. They aren't (I believe) in the Oxford dictionary yet and are unfortunately all tangled up in socio-political issues that it's probably best not to deal with in the story for at least the near-term future. Or in the discussion at all since that would invite a modhammer (and frankly I'd just as soon avoid them even without that threat). Still the options exist and would arguably be applicable in a situation where no educated guess at gender could be reasonably made.

 

Thank you, corrected.

 

No, it definitely still sounds weird if you use it in some situations where you'd use he/she or a name (and you can't use names if you don't know them).

"They went to the store to get milk.", "He/She went to the store to get milk.", or "Zoat went to the store to get milk." are all fine.
"They went to the store to get milk for their tea." sounds a little odd, I think maybe it feels too impersonal if you're referring to someone you know, but maybe that one's just me. Should still work fine in other situations, anyway.
"Zoat wants to go to the store to get milk.", or "He/She wants to go to the store to get milk." are fine. "They wants to go to the store to get milk." is completely wrong, necessitating the use of "He/She" unless you know their name, which is not always the case.

Edit: It's just occurred to me that I was dumb, and that sentence sounds fine if you just drop the s on the "wants". I still think that "they" sounds a little weird in that sentence, and only gets moreso as you keep using it.

 

It's not quite the same, because 'they' can be a plural while 'he' is always singular.

 

...so?

 

As I was saying, don't compare "they" to "he" -- compare it to "you" and you'll find that grammatically it works out almost identically:

Who went to the store to get milk? You/They went to the store to get milk.
Who wants to go to the store? You/They want to go to the store.
Who wants to get milk for their tea? (<-- note that "their" in this context is what most people will say by default) You/they want to get milk for your/their tea.
Who is the milk for? The milk is for you/them.
Whose milk is it? The milk is yours/theirs.

British English speakers have even less reason to complain, since they use mass nouns, which are grammatically singular, with verbs that are grammatically plural.

 

And they is both misleading and sounds idiotic. He, she, and it all make sense.

It is only "dehumanizing" because humans naturally have two sexes and ascribe value to them so to deny someone either of the two is to deny that individuals humanity.

"It" is a perfectly reasonable pronoun for humans who do not express a preference (and makes far more sense than "they"), and is the best choice for an asexual species because they wouldn't even have the concept of gender.

So you want humans to speak in the second person then?

"They went to the store" means "that group of people went to the store". He/She/Xir/It/etc. went to the store means "that individual went to the store".

If you don't want to be identified by He or She then choose a simple two or three character placeholder that means "individual who is not male or female" and argue for that word to be accepted. As stupid as Xir is, it actually makes some sense as a term - "a pronoun that does not identify the gender of the individual it is referencing" has some use.

Using "they" just makes you sound like a twat.

 

It puts the lotion in the basket.

 

Otherwise translated as "An individual of indeterminate or unknown gender puts the lotion in the basket."

They put the lotion in the basket comes across as "A group of individuals put the lotion in the basket".

He shot at me, they shot at me, it shot at me all mean distinctly different things to the average English speaker. They and he/she/it are not really interchangeable.

Singular they is just a fucking stupid idea. Language naturally evolved to have two gendered pronouns, creating a third gender neutral pronoun makes sense. Using a word that is not singular as generally used because one is too lazy to develop a proper non gendered singular pronoun ("it" being considered insulting for some inane reason) is just idiotic.

 

Singular they is quite common in spoken language, though usually when the specific person being referred to is unknown. As in "Whoever did this, they are going to be sorry when I find them." (Aggressive though it is, that's the first example that came to mind.) Or "If someone volunteers I'll buy them lunch." Or "I'm meeting someone to iron out the details of the plans, but I don't know who they are yet." That kind of use for "they" is pretty common, though I suppose it may just be a regional thing. And using it in place of a gendered pronoun because you don't know the gender of a known person would be really odd.

As for singular genderless pronouns, some exist for English, though as I mentioned above they are not in any dictionary I'm aware of yet and come with a tangled mess of socio-political issues and thus may not be the best choice to use in this particular story given recent history. Plus they're not exactly in common usage.

 

I'm not here to start a fight. I'm here to explain a set of facts, not push any particular agenda.

That said: You are, quite simply, factually wrong.

Take the facts to whatever conclusion you wish, but saying that singular they is a "stupid idea" completely disregards the fact that it does in fact exist, and it has existed in English since before the Great Vowel Shift. That's right, singular they has been in use so long that if you were to listen to someone speak English as it was spoken at its earliest known attestation, you wouldn't even recognize it as the same language.

The English language did not evolve to have two gendered pronouns. It evolved to have seven sets of pronouns, and only two of them are gendered. However, six of them are universally considered personal pronouns, and the seventh is (only slightly less universally) not. Those seven are "I", "we", "you", "he", "she", "they", and "it" -- "he" and "she" are the only ones that are gendered, and "it" is the only one that is not considered to be a personal pronoun in general consensus.

If you think that singular they is inappropriate to use, I'm not going to argue with you on that point. And I won't oppose the idea of creating a non-gendered singular third-person pronoun; this may well be a good idea. (I prefer modified Spivak, though; I think ey/em/eir is more likely to catch on by virtue of being parallel to a more familiar construction instead of obviously looking made-up.) However, such a statement is an opinion, as the English language (unlike French) does not have an official standard that defines what is and is not grammatically correct usage. As such, you are welcome to that opinion, but you must recognize that other opinions in the matter are valid and have meaningful evidence to support them.

 

Singular they is in Shakespeare and KJV which makes it only slightly newer than singular you as used by Elizabeth I whose father Henry VIII was still using thou

 

My friend, singular they is in Chaucer.

EDIT: I should be more precise.

The earliest attestation of singular they I can find dates to 1382. The spelling of the original doesn't match modern orthography, but the words are very clearly "Each one in their own craft is wise." This isn't Chaucer (it's from Wycliffe's Bible) but Chaucer has an attestation from only a few years later (updated to modern orthography, "And whoso findeth him out of such blame, they will come up"). Note how these are very clearly intelligible to modern English speakers; it's obviously the same language.

By contrast, the earliest attestation I can find to grammarians insisting that you SHOULDN'T do this doesn't come up until the mid-1800s, and it was a contentious issue at that time because other grammarians were going out of their way at around the same time to point out uses of singular they in contemporary writing.

That's not to say that generic he wasn't in use in middle English; it certainly was. But it was originally not explicitly a masculine pronoun, but rather a non-specific one that only gained a masculine quality when compared to the specific word used for female individuals. The use of singular they was -- at least in part -- an evolution to accommodate the increasing association of "he" with the masculine gender as opposed to being untagged. (Compare: Anglo-Saxon "man" generic, "wir-man" masculine (modern cognate: "virile"), "wif-man" feminine (modern cognate: "wife"), with the generic becoming eventually tagged as masculine.)

 

Ah, perhaps we've reached the point where we should start reeling things back?

 

Yeah, Shakespeare was bad enough, but then they had to bring Chaucer into it?!? That's how flame wars are started!!!

 

Lol. I went to look you up on SV only to find you'd been banned. Nice to see you on QQ though, Mr Zoat. Speaking of which, if you want to actually have a conversation on the subject that got you banned, I'd be willing to do via PMs. XD

(Unless a mod tells me politics is banned there too, in which case all bets are off. :/)