Hello Nexians,

Using gender-ambiguous language has been on my mind quite a bit lately.

I've found I tend to assume other members of The Nexus are male when no gender is specified.


Here's a site that outlines how to be gender-inclusive in one's writing:

Guidlines for Gender-Fair use of Language


I love you Nexian Brothers and Sisters,
wearepeople

Thanks

I think this is an interesting subject, and I definitely think we need to be mindful of how we use our language since it seems to also affect how we view the world. Maybe by using language in a more conscious way we could help changing a little bit our male-oriented society.

Did you ever look into E-Prime ? It's the idea of not using absolutes when speaking, for example instead of saying : "he's a bad person" one could say "he seems to me to be a bad person", or things of the sort. Not the same thing but also related and important, I think

And another offtopic thing, but when I read this thread, it reminded me of once when I wrote some years back about the use of language when dealing with the subject of 'drugs', maybe someone finds it interesting so I thought I could link it here: https://www.dmt-nexus.me...ts&m=13315#post13315

Anyways thanks for this

Interesting link. I like to stress that I am a woman here as that is rather rare. Also, being rather active as well as the oldest female here (We had an older one but she posted an intro essay and disappeared.) are fairly important differentiations to me. Though I'm pretty much one of the guys so to speak I don't want to always be addressed as a guy. This inclusive language is really easy to adopt and I'll see if I can focus on making it a part of my writing here. Thanks.

I find that if you're mindful about word choice in general, then gender-fair use of language comes pretty naturally. The only real difficulty comes in choosing a gender neutral singular pronoun.

Most style guides suggest rewriting sentences to avoid the need for a singular pronoun if at all possible. If it can't be avoided, they often suggest the same work-arounds proposed in the original post's link: use "he or she", or "s/he", or alternate between she and he. Personally, I'm not a fan of any of those options; they feel clunky and inelegant.

Fortunately there's an easy solution: just use "they" (and it's possessive form "their" as a singular pronoun. A lot of grammatical prescriptivists rankle at this usage, and insist that "they" should only be used as a plural pronoun. To them I say, "Poppycock!" In spoken English, the singular "they" is a common usage. The word has been used in this fashion by numerous classic and celebrated authors, from Shakespeare on.

So I say ignore the rigid grammarians and use the word that simply makes good sense: they.

Thanks for the link!

Wikipedia has a nice table for gender-neutral pronouns as well. I've been previously introduced to the forms ze, zhe, and hir and cannot speak for the others.

Language is a bitch

I am a b _ _ _h and absolute LOVER of the English language, its' extreme expressibility and enormous vocabulary.

Those gender free pronouns like ze are fascinating to me. I wonder if we could ever get folks to use them?

In Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos series he has made everyone gender free by either always referring to them by their name or job title and when pronouns came up it was always M. For example, M. Meina Gladstone (female) was the President of the stellar union, M. Sol Weintraub (male) was the Wandering Jew searching for his daughter traveling backwards in time, etc.

M. really worked for me I gotta say, .

Thanks for the link! I always try to write gender-neutral, this information might help out.