* Joy Beeson:
> On Sun, 31 Oct 2021 19:33:40 -0400, Quinn C
> <
lispa...@crommatograph.info> wrote:
>
>> The people for whom asking for pronouns is the end of civilization now
>> are the ones who saw it coming when women started wearing pants.
>
> Pfft.
>
> Today I said "John wrote that they will come home for Christmas."
>
> The pronoun fanatics have made that sentence ambiguous -- you have to
> know John to know that he said "we will come home".
>
> An attack on communication is an attack on civilization -- we are
> still suffering from singular "you".
Ha - this hardly registers as a blip on my misunderstand-o-meter.
Do you know John? Does the person you were talking to? Yes? Then you're
fine.
And it's not even so much that context disambiguates language. It is -
insight I owe to linguist Charles F. Hockett - that we express in
language what isn't already clear in the situation. No need to state the
obvious.
So if it had been necessary, you'd have said "the two of them will come
home". It's not really hard.
I haven't shared this in a long time, but this is something I started
observing in elementary school: those two over there seem to be in a big
argument, but really, all it is is that this one is using word X to mean
A, and that one uses X to mean B. It's all about nothing.
Happens all the time. One more ambiguous pronoun amps it up by what?
0.02%?
> And I really, really don't like being a member of two protected
> classes. Creating new protected classes is not an advance in
> civilization.
What, like (30-something) Titus Andromedon on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt:
"Now I'm black, gay *and* old? I won't even know which box to check!"
(quoting from memory)
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