{"id":90,"date":"2006-01-09T23:21:46","date_gmt":"2006-01-10T07:21:46","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=90"},"modified":"2020-08-29T14:31:03","modified_gmt":"2020-08-29T21:31:03","slug":"transgendered-word-forms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/archives\/2006\/01\/09\/transgendered-word-forms\/","title":{"rendered":"Transgendered word forms"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chi2006.org\/docs\/chi2006extendedabstracts.pdf\" class=\"unemphasized\"><abbr title=\"Computer Human Interaction\">CHI<\/abbr> 2006 submission guidelines (<abbr title=\"Portable Document Format\">PDF<\/abbr>)<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nBe careful with the use of gender-specific pronouns (he, she) and other gender-specific words (chairman, manpower, man-months). Use inclusive language (e.g., she or he, they, chair, staff, staff-hours, person-years) that is gender-neutral. If necessary, you may be able to use &#8220;he&#8221; and &#8220;she&#8221; in alternating sentences, so that the two genders occur equally often.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Sigh.  Not that I don&#8217;t believe in gender equality, but <strong>alternating genders across sentences is supremely stupid<\/strong>, unless your goal is to ruin otherwise perfectly good sentence and paragraph flow (and comprehensibility).  You&#8217;d think an organization trying to improve human interaction would have better sense.  Or maybe some people purposely want to disrupt readability so they can draw attention to themselves: &#8220;Hey, look at us, we aren&#8217;t sexist!  Aren&#8217;t we great?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I have a better idea: Okay, English doesn&#8217;t have neutered word forms, but we can make some up.  Better yet, let&#8217;s make up some <strong>transgendered words<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>he\/she: <strong>\u2019e<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>him\/her: <strong>herm<\/strong> (which could double as an abbreviation for &#8220;hermaphrodite&#8221;)<\/li>\n<li>his\/hers: <strong>herms<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From the CHI 2006 submission guidelines (PDF): Be careful with the use of gender-specific pronouns (he, she) and other gender-specific words (chairman, manpower, man-months). Use inclusive language (e.g., she or he, they, chair, staff, staff-hours, person-years) that is gender-neutral. If necessary, you may be able to use &#8220;he&#8221; and &#8220;she&#8221; in alternating sentences, so that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[31],"class_list":["post-90","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantsraves","tag-chi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}