For anyone else who was unfamiliar, the GPI is the “Global Peace Index”, and it has literally nothing to do with this conversation - it’s just the first metric TechNerdWizard42 could pull out of their ass where the US is ranked low.
I betcha ten bucks the number of men violently killed in Australia so far this year is significantly higher, just like it is every year. Weird how I can never find any articles about that though.
The incredibly tiny proportion of the population who are murderers, I’d assume (less than 1 out of every 10,000 people in the US per year if my math is right).
Both sets of victims are equally dead, of course, just with a much higher percentage of those dead victims being men, and a much smaller percentage of those dead victims being the ones stories like this always seem to focus on.
Like go ahead and argue for an end to misandristic violence if you’d like.
Nah, I’ll go ahead and argue for an end to all violent crime, and not exclude the victims who aren’t lucky enough to have their gender be the reason they were murdered.
I’ve never understood this prevalent idea that murder victims are only worth caring about if their gender played a role. Like, how horribly fucked-up is it to say that some murder victims are more worthy of concern than others, especially when those victims only comprise a small minority of murders?
Being killed because of your gender and being killed because you were in the wrong place or because you looked like an easy mark are all equally bad reasons to murder someone. They’re also all phenomena that could just as easily be addressed by government programs like in the OP, and yet all we ever hear about is the “violence against women” epidemic that only affects a minority of victims.
Plus, even if the numbers of women murdered for their gender is going up (which is obviously horrible and inexcusable), that number still has a long way to go before it even approaches the much higher number of men who are already being killed every year. Like, of course it’s a horrible thing that the number of murdered women is increasing, but I fail to see how that’s so much more important than the much higher number of men who are already being killed, but that nobody is doing anything about.
I mean, the reason for it is the same as it always is - men are seen as disposable by society and therefore issues affecting them are ignored - it just sucks to constantly be inundated with evidence of just how deeply ingrained this misandry is in our society.
Statcounter reports that Windows 11 continues to lose its market share for the second month in a row. Windows 10, meanwhile, is gaining more users and is now back above the 70% mark.
Here’s a great in-depth video on Edison and his relationship with Tesla. It seems that Edison was actually remarkably progressive for the time in a lot of ways, and, while not perfect, he seems to have been a much better employer than many of his rivals.
Edit: Lol and then like ten hours after this comment they dropped a four and a half hour video going into much more detail about both.
Since nobody has mentioned the actual reason for this phenomenon yet, the difference here is usually one of known vs. unknown gender/referent. (At least for practically all older speakers of English. Some younger speakers do seem to be able to use “they” grammatically to refer to known people. Changes in progress, woo!)
Your example is a perfect one: in a question like “whose umbrella is this?” we have no idea what gender the owner is, and so “they” is grammatical for the vast majority of English speakers.
Once the gender/referent is known, however, for many/most speakers of English (myself included), “they” becomes ungrammatical and the speaker must switch to “he” or “she”:
“Whose umbrella is this? Did they already leave?”
“That’s John’s.”
*“Oh, they need to come get it then.” (The asterisk here is the common linguistic notation for ungrammaticality. This also assumes that both speakers are familiar with who John is. You can still get grammatical “they” after responses that refer to unknown people, especially with common gender-ambiguous names like Pat.)
So, for anyone wondering why many speakers, probably including themselves (if they’re honest enough to admit it), seem to find known-gender singular “they” to be awkward/ungrammatical when supposedly “it’s been grammatical for a thousand years”, that’s why!
I already mentioned that we can get grammatical “they” with non-definite/unknown referents (your first and third examples), and in the second example Shakespeare is clearly referring to all mothers with “them”, so none of these are counterexamples to my generalization above. I think you’ll be hard pressed to find many examples with a specific, definite antecedent (though it is possible, of course - grammaticality is a spectrum, after all).
This distinction, as well as the fact that modern speakers are showing various innovative uses of “they”, has been well known for decades in the linguistic literature.
It kinda grinds my gears when people intentionally (or maybe just ignorantly in this case) misconstrue linguistic data to support their political positions, and that includes all of the boneheads acting like singular “they” isn’t a thing at all for their own nefarious purposes as well.
It doesn’t matter that English hasn’t had specific singular “they” until Gen Z. That’s just a fact of history and language, and has (or at least should have) nothing to do with the rights of non-binary people.
Stop using bullshit linguistic data to try to justify your political positions! All of you! This is how we get Hindu nationalists justifying their oppression of Muslims with ridiculous claims that Sanskrit is the original human language. Language is just language!
Edit: I just went and read your other thread, and it does appear that you’re just being disingenuous at this point, or at least doubling down after being proved incorrect. Your own source pointed out that Shakespeare would not have used “they” with specific individuals. Thymos is completely (and demonstrably) correct.
That’s not relevant to our conversation here - we’re not talking about how language should be used (which linguistics, as an empirical/rationalist science, has nothing to say about), we’re talking about how it is used.
What a weird distinction to make that it’s talking about an abstract gendered person rather than concrete. I don’t know why the grammar would make that distinction (nor do I think it does).
Then you’re gonna be absolutely gobsmacked by the other grammatical distinctions that exist across the world’s languages.
It doesn’t matter if you know why the grammar would make that distinction or not - the distinction exists, and is widely accepted in the linguistic literature (as cited above) whether you think it does or not.
The argument that is almost always made is that “they can’t be singular.”
I’m not sure what that has to do with our conversation, since I’ve never made that claim (and neither did Thymos). If that’s what you’re basing your argument on here, then that’s a pretty egregious strawman of my position.
Sure, maybe it historically hasn’t been used for a particular subject, but that’s a fairly minor grammatical shift.
And yet it exists nonetheless, rendering your “correction” of my original comment (and your “correction” of Thymos’s comments in the other thread, for that matter) inaccurate and misleading.
If we’re going to argue that’s wrong because it isn’t historically accepted then we probably need to speak a totally different version of English than we do because it has made much larger shifts than that in the past.
I haven’t argued that anything is “wrong” other than your description of the historical use of English pronouns. Linguistics is descriptive, not normative, which means that the historical facts of English have no bearing whatsoever on what we “probably need” to do.
Sometimes I do so because the gender is irrelevant
This seems to be part of the pathway of change that has led to the widespread adoption of specific singular “they” among younger speakers, and there’s some empirical evidence supporting this.
What I don’t get is, how can knowing the gender suddenly make it difficult to use a neutral term, if it worked before?
This is just one of those arbitrary rules that often exist in language, like how in many languages neuter/inanimate nouns can’t act as the subject of a sentence due to what’s called an “animacy restriction”.
For this specific phenomenon (the “older” ungrammaticality of definite singular they vs. the “younger” grammaticality of it), this recent paper argues that this is due to a difference in obligatoriness of morphosyntactic gender features. The paper is a bit technical if you don’t have a linguistic background, but the basic argument is that in older varieties of English, gender features must be obligatorily expressed in the morphosyntactic derivation if they are known, while in younger varieties, this expression seems to be optional, and therefore free variation between he/they and she/they is allowed by the grammar.
So, “It’s John’s. They need to come get it” is ungrammatical for older speakers for not obligatorily expressing the gender feature once it’s known, while it’s perfectly fine for younger speakers for whom expressing that feature seems to be optional in the grammar.
Maybe this analogy will help: Let’s say you meet someone, and you ask them “Do you have a cat?”. Note that you’ve used the singular here, though it’s acting number-neutral in this context. If they respond “I have two”, then it will immediately become ungrammatical for you to continue to use the number-neutral singular and ask “Does your cat like fish?”
Once you have access to the information that there’s more than one cat, then the arbitrary rules of English grammar require that knowledge to immediately be reflected in the morphosyntactic structure of your sentences from then on. And this makes no independent, logical sense, because there are tons of languages out there that don’t have plurality distinctions. But, English does, and so to speak grammatical English (for now), you have to use plural morphology to refer to more than one entity.
It’s the same for “older” speakers of English - just like it’s ungrammatical for you to continue to use the number-neutral singular once you know that there’s a “plural number feature” in the linguistic context, for older speakers of English it’s ungrammatical for them to continue to use the gender-neutral “they” once they know that there’s a “masculine gender feature” in the linguistic context.
Also, it’s important to note that this term “ungrammatical” is descriptive, not prescriptive - it’s not saying that it’s not “proper” or “correct” according to some arbitrary standard that someone decided on in the 1800s, but rather that’s literally not how those speakers’ mental grammars work. While it may seem illogical (and even regressive from a modern political perspective), every natural human language is composed of arbitrary rules that often seem illogical. Like how the past tense of “go” is the completely unrelated past tense of the older English verb “to wend”, “went”. Or how the past tense of the verb “can” isn’t “could” anymore – that’s reserved for modal usage now in most English dialects – it’s the completely awkward phrase “was able to”.
That doesn’t mean that we can’t, or shouldn’t, try to accommodate non-binary people of course, as is unfortunately often argued, but it does mean that, contrary to what I commonly see people say on the internet, doing so for these speakers does require a constant, concerted effort to consciously override their mental grammars.
Hacked data reveals which US gun sellers are behind Mexican cartel violence (www.usatoday.com)
State Department issues travel alert for LGBTQ people, events abroad (abcnews.go.com)
Flat Earth is so yesterday (lemmy.world)
xi jinping cocksuckerule
Australia tries to stop a violence against women 'epidemic', starting with schools (www.bbc.com)
…...
Microsoft wipes out evidence of real ads in Windows 11 Start menu (www.xda-developers.com)
Chile's true ambition (lemmy.world)
Men over 30, what do you keep in your bedside nightstand?
Linux Mint 22 Will Include Preinstalled App for Matrix (www.omgubuntu.co.uk)
tl;dr :...
Windows 10 reaches 70% market share as Windows 11 keeps declining (www.neowin.net)
Statcounter reports that Windows 11 continues to lose its market share for the second month in a row. Windows 10, meanwhile, is gaining more users and is now back above the 70% mark.
Thomas Edison was the Elon musk of his era (lemmy.world)
I bet that rich dumb ass would love this comparison.
Pronouns (lemmy.world)
Ben Stiller on Zoolander 2's 'Blindsiding' Flop: 'Wow, I must have really f**ked this up' (www.ign.com)
language rule (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
Transphobes are doxxing Stardew Valley fans after they asked the game developer for pronouns
thepinknews.com/…/stardew-valley-transphobes-doxx…
Tennessee legislature bans local cities and counties from passing their own red flag laws (www.newschannel5.com)