emails
\sigh
shemails?
So is it alright to just assume trump is female? The email signature no longer states her preferred pronouns, so I think this is what she wants?
This is just begging for malicious compliance.
You want to eliminate an entire part of speech? Then good luck trying to understand what the fuck my email is trying to say.
Does the reader want to eliminate an entire part of speech? Then good luck trying to understand what the fuck the writer’s email is trying to say.
Could be fun. I bet ChatGPT could automate it.
Think it is important for people to remove all pronouns from documents. Without, people will be more free to interpret what these messages mean to. This type of malicious compliance will only go so far, sadly.
Comment used it, these, and this. Please remove offensive pronouns, children may be present and children must not learn the english language
children must not learn the english language
Reminds me of…
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc—should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as “This dog is free from lice” or “This field is free from weeds.” It could not be used in its old sense of “politically free” or “intellectually free” since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.
I’ve said it before, I remember reading this novel as a teen and finding the parts about language to be boring and far-fetched.
Looking back, it was probably one of the most important things that Orwell discussed. That shit is incredibly powerful, and it fundamentally shapes how we think and view the world without us even realizing it.
I remember reading Thomas Paine in high school and most of the students couldn’t even understand it. That stuff was printed for the average bloke 200 years ago. The stuff that helped light the American populace to take up arms and overthrow tyrannical rule isn’t even comprehendable to our poorly educated populace now. Being a genius isn’t required to foment revolution, but common language is, literally and figuratively.
If you haven’t learned vocabulary, your brain struggles to conceive, identify and of course use it in course of thought. One of the reasons right wing news and cable so often misuses and deliberately butchers important words like traitor, fascist, etc. is they want to strip them of their very important meaning so they aren’t notable when used.
21% of adult Americans are considered to have low English literacy. Two thirds of these people were born in the US. This basically means they can read the words in a paragraph, but not understand the meaning of the paragraph. A further 4% are functionally illiterate.
This is disgusting.
Fuck “No Child Left Behind”. Kids shouldn’t pass elementary school without being able to deduce the meaning of a paragraph unless they have a mental disability. I don’t care if they have to repeat 5th grade three times. And of course any non passing student should be offered tutoring for free long before they get to the point of being held back.
Oregon, despite being home to Powell’s books and thought of as progressive has one of the worst high school graduation rates,ath and literacy rates in the country. After the pandemic they straight up removed many math and English requirements from high school curriculum under the guise of “equity” for those affected by the learning disruptions cause by COVID. It was pretty clearly less about serving disadvantaged students than raising the abysmal education statistics.
That said, educators are doing as much social work now as they are education as society collapses in on itself and generational poverty, social ills related to poverty, poisons in our environment and relating depression and anxiety from young to old metastasize nationally. Teachers cannot hope to fix all that in a few hours a day let alone make up for years of lacking learning environments outside of school for their students.
They’re teaching phonics still in 3rd grade.
Yeah, I know a little about what they’re dealing with. My sister-in-law is a high school history teacher. She still has to bartend at least two nights a week to afford to raise her kids. On top of all that extra unpaid work.
The Oregon thing is new to me but not surprising. They’d already begun changing teaching to be about passing the standardized tests rather than learning by the time I graduated high school, over 20 years ago.
I had my son read this book. He was partway through and began exclaiming how much it paralleled today.
Hugely pedantic here, but only “it” is a pronoun there (specifically an anticipatory subject, a kind of expletive pronoun), the others are adjectives.
They should replace all pronouns with [redacted].
my new bio: (masculine neutral/masculine possessive)
my new bio: (masculine neutral/masculine possessive)
Isn’t it nominative/objective?
I don’t see “he/his” or “they/their,” I see “he/him” and “they/them.”
I put all of them in, ie he/him/his… just to remove ambiguity.
And pronouns remain in my sig. Ain’t going anywhere.
Probably! Been a long time since I’ve been to school.
I guess Trump doesn’t want to be referred to as He/Him
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-appears-accidentally-declared-every-174749266.html
Hmmm, I see…
Hope you’re not named Elle.
Or He-Man
Trump’s idol **inrich ***mler would be offended too!
Can’t? I think the better way to phrase it, is that everyone is freed from being forced or intimidated into using them, which was ridiculous to begin with.
The whole thing was sexist. Just say your name, no one needs to know any more than that. You’re a human, that’s enough.
People don’t need to be defined by all that other crap.
Nobody was forcing anybody to use them you fucking twat. It was always voluntary. You only have an issue with it because you don’t think trans deserve any recognition or respect.
The only thing that might have happened was when you started crying about pronouns queer people in general and allies saw you as the asshole you are and would keep you at arms length and work related only.
Although, if you threw a big enough hissy fit you could probably get disciplined for harrasment or fired for causing a toxic work environment.
And because you are such a massive baby throwing a temper tantrum you think you are being descriminated against or “forced” into something. Which from my perspective you are crying because you don’t like people expecting you to be a decent human being instead of a hateful bitch.
I work with military and the more conservative ones are bitch-made and demand to use the properly gendered honorific. Seeing CPT CUMBRAIN as the sign-off on an email doesn’t let you know how to address them. Commissioned officers get called either sir or ma’am, and some will turn into cry baby bitches if you don’t get it right. They love their pronouns.
It says email signatures.
And good; it’s ridiculous, virtue-signalling bullshit and you’ve got to let it go.
You fuckers need to let your vice-signaling go. Funny how “freedom” to ignore pronouns quickly gives way to banning them. The only freedom you guys seem to care about is the freedom to be ignorant pieces of shit.
Yeah, turns out reality is more nuanced than that.
It’s useful for people with unisex names like Taylor, Chris, or Jordan, especially in email, where you may not have any face-to-face contact.
Or for people with names from cultures not associated with English naming standards such as Chinese or Indian cultures working in western companies or governments.
Pop quiz anti-pronouners! 星辰 Xīng Chén, girl or boy? 美莉 Měi Lì, girl or boy?? Would you like to buy a pronoun now?
The first is male, the second is female, but I study Chinese so that’s not very fair of me.
Yes, that’s a reasonable position.
And good; it’s ridiculous, virtue-signalling bullshit and you’ve got to let it go.
You’re expressing a VERY strong negative reaction on words in an email signature. Why are you so threatened by what someone puts in their email signature? How does it challenge or change what you are that you’ve put so much thought into it to get this angry about it?
Because it’s very, very silly identity politics and the majority of people agree. You’ve got to let it go and focus on important things, like the insane and ever-increasing wealth inequality.
I’m been told that it is not just virtue-signaling (it is), but that it is also a virtue (allyship) in action. Normalizing sharing that information make it easier for people that have a more complex relationship wither their gender than I do.
