kbal

It’s the marketing department that should really be worried.

Turns out I was wrong though, according to the dictionary “post” does have that meaning, at least approximately. I think that sense is somewhat archaic, probably surviving thanks to exactly one well-worn cliché phrase.

The 4-letter one is obvious, perhaps even more so if you’re British. The 8-letter one I probably should’ve got more quickly. The five-letter one is dubious at best. The six-letter one is definitely not a synonym of “post” at all. So yeah, not easy this time.

There’s no need to go back to paper maps if it’s just GPS and mobile Internet that are unavailable. Osmand works just fine without them. It’s the map application I always wanted, none of that always-online nonsense.

Hmm. Maybe if I live long enough, my only slightly rusty skills in map reading and navigation by dead reckoning will once again be useful.

“The only intuitive interface is the nipple. After that, it’s all learned.” — traditional 20th-century folk wisdom.

Wow, cool, even NBC is catching on to the Fediverse now?

… nope, it’s just another blockchain fueled social media system, the main use of which so far seems to be as a haven for QAnon types (according to Wikipedia,) rapidly burning up venture capital. Good luck to them, I guess.

It’s difficult to say, because all the atoms suddenly doing that would mean that some basic laws of physics had changed, and since it isn’t specified exactly how they’ve changed to produce this strange result it’s hard to predict what might happen next.

But it seems a reasonably safe assumption that there would be a large explosion and then no more Earth.

I’m not usually much interested in “food experiences” but nonetheless I have an answer and it is the sugar shack pancake breakfast.

The surprise is that apparently 28 percent of “experienced programmers” don’t have an ad blocker. I’m not sure how they got the data, but I wonder if their methods are up to the task of sorting out any possible inverse correlation between blocking ads and being willing to respond to polls.

Calling 1048576 bytes an “American megabyte” might be technically wrong, but it’s still slightly less goofy-looking than the more conventional “MiB” notation. I wish you good luck in making it the new standard.

The best sandwich in the world was the ham and cheese one I had yesterday. It was a couple days old, but I put it in the toaster oven for a few minutes, and since it was after all the best sandwich in the world, it was still pretty good. Sorry world, I ate it.

Ah well, sorry about that; I felt I didn’t express myself well in that last one but I stand by the part where I don’t think we disagree on anything too substantial basically. Thanks for the reply, see you around.

Using “he” as the default singular 3rd-person pronoun goes back centuries, not decades. It was sexist to varying degrees, but never all that close to truly gender-neutral since modern English itself goes back only so far as times that have been pretty close to maximally sexist. But you can see it plainly in the King James Version of the Bible for example. You won’t find any singular “they” there in the sort of places where its use today is novel. There are of course plenty of places where its use is not novel at all.

The late 20th-century innovation was to write out “he or she” in the many places where it seemed necessary, because we didn’t have any single word that would fit. Using “they” to refer to “someone”, “anyone”, or other referents like that was perfectly normal as it has always been. The examples you provide are most naturally thought of in that way and would not spook the old people today. Using “they” to refer to “a student” or some other specified but unnamed individual would on the other hand often seem wrong to people just 30 years ago, but one might sometimes get away with it depending on the audience and the grammatical circumstances. Using “they” to refer to “Jason” or other such specifically known and named people in general was not done, never had been done except perhaps by the occasional poet from centuries past, and everyone would just wonder who you were talking about even if they’d been named earlier in the same sentence. Calling Jason a “she” would also seem odd, but not nearly as odd as calling them a “they”; and if what I’ve read is at all representative then roughly similar logic would’ve usually applied in centuries going back to fairly near the start of modern English.

As may still come in handy on occasion, that short-lived move towards using the hideously awkward phrase “he or she” gave many of us plenty of practice in simply avoiding all phrases that call for a gender-neutral 3rd-person pronoun. Whatever else might be said about it, being able to use “they” is certainly an improvement over that situation.

Of course it is not that it’s somehow a “stand in for he or she” inherently in current usage. It’s just that it has recently replaced those other pronouns in places where for some time they had held near-universal prevalence among most users of this language.

Just as some people who’ve never known the old ways think those people who still aren’t accustomed to it are putting on an act when they say it’s weird and confusing, I suppose it would be easy for those who’ve lived through the change to mistakenly assume that young people are being disingenuous when they act as if there’s been no change for hundreds of years and there’s nothing to remark on here. If you’re old enough to have seen it happen, the change in usage seems very obvious. If not, perhaps it isn’t.

Not all of the complaints are motivated just by deliberate obstinance. I’m old enough that it was genuinely confusing for me at first in some situations, but young enough that I got used to it after some years. There are still plenty of people out there who haven’t done enough conversing with those who habitually default to “they” to get used to it. Not all of them are as old and cranky as Mr. Stallman.

I don’t really have a preference myself, but Richard Stallman’s continued insistence that “per” is the right answer is the example that comes to mind.

As he puts it, “most languages have genderless singular third-person pronouns which are distinct from the plural pronouns. English deserves to have them too.”

Perhaps in a hundred years, once the old way of making the distinction is long forgotten, a new one will arise.

Obviously it’s been used in some grammatical situations as a singular third-person pronoun since forever. It’s just as easy to come up with example phrases that would not sound in any way odd to a 20th-century person as it is to come up with examples from the 17th century. But its recent popularity as an all-purpose stand-in for “he” and “she” is indeed unprecedented, and even if it weren’t it’d be a notable change.

Nah. Maybe twenty years tops. That so many people fell for the fallacious line of argument you’re thinking of was part of the difficulty in trying to push for any of the various theoretically “better” choices that are still available should humanity unexpectedly swerve in the direction of caring about such things.

Unfortunately you’re at least ten years too late in trying to get people to ask themselves this question