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I just applied for a job that included this beautiful pronoun selection question (skipped it). Then further down the page there was another blank field to enter my pronouns (skipped it)!
I kind of want to know what the hell "Fae/Faer" is, but also kind of don't. Is that for people who identify as fairy folk? I can see that giving you an advantage on your job application!
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Can anyone steelman the case for any of the non-standard pronouns? Why hasn't the LGBT community settled on he/she/they, or even just exclusively using they?
Also curious what's the point of including the subject and object forms (e.g. he and him), seems redundant to me, unless someone is combining he/her or she/him? I've heard non-binary folks are doing similar that in languages where both the verbs and pronouns inflect based on gender and there isn't any neuter form (e.g. hebrew)
English is not my native language but "it" seems much more gramatically correct than the plural ambiguous "they".
The fact we alter language to make it more ambiguous, for humans and even more so for AIs is worrying.
At some point I was for eliminating she/he but then I remembered the little known fact that it is useful for coreference resolution. However besides this fact I'm convinced if we eliminated he/she, there would be much less identity wars between the two genders and therefore more egalitarianism.
More grammatically correct, but also very rude. To use "it" as a pronoun carries the connotation that you're referring to an inanimate object. As you might imagine, people don't like this.
I appreciate the desire for good grammar but using "it" as the neutral third person pronoun will never catch on because of how rude it is.
To be fair, "it" is still used for infants, and it used to be used for non-infant children as well.* Maybe it could make a comeback.
*Examples from a 1902 children's book coincidentally named Five Children and It:
Eugenisists, Anti-natalists, and Fabiains (but i repeat myself) have been trying to normalize the use of "it" to refer to children, infants, and the mentally impaired since the late 19th century. It hasn't caught on for reasons already covered by @SubstantialFrivolity, refering to humans as inanimate ojects just naturally sticks in a lot of people's craws, but that hasnt stopped them from continuing to try.
This seems a bit preposterous. Could you provide a source? As far as I can tell, 'it' was simply the most common pronoun for infants in the 19th century, and considering that 50% of infants didn't make it past early childhood, it sort of made sense not to get too attached to your infant child.
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