preferred pronouns

[WaffleLapkin]

these thoughts were in my head for a while, but a few days ago i saw "preferred pronouns" being used in a comment on this video (i'm obviously not trying to shame the person who wrote it or anything, they clearly didn't meant anything bad), which made me want to share them.

thanks to jyn for proofreading.

[Rudxain]

Note

I'm unsure if I should comment here, but:

• there are no GH-Discussions
• the blog doesn't link to any kind of comment section

I mostly agree with the post. Here are my 2 cents:

• I prefer masculine or non-binary pronouns: he/him, they/them, it/its, zey/zhem, any/unknown/void/undefined/null/nil/never, etc...
• I don't care if I'm addressed with a feminine pronoun, but it's still weird (and funny? it depends), because it doesn't match my identity
• All of the above only applies to english, as my native language is spanish, which hasn't stabilized the semantic equivalent of "they": "elle". Both because of language-specific and cultural reasons.

"Elle" feels kinda like adding a new feature to JavaScript: the language wasn't designed with that feature in mind, so it "sticks out" as a hack that had to be slapped on top of a lot of technical-debt. I've already mentioned the unfortunate fact that ES revolves around Numbers, which makes BigInt feel like a 2nd-class feature. Meanwhile in Python, BigInts are the norm, they're just ints!

Sorry, I got into a tangent there 😅. Coming back to the "technical-debt" part, in Spanish everything is gendered by default, so a gender-neutral word begs the question of how the language should be extended to work harmoniously with it. I guess this is why it hasn't seen so much traction as "they", which does feel like a "built-in" feature of English