Comment by PaulHoule
5 days ago
Doug Hofstader in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamagical_Themas has a good essay on non-sexist language crica 1980 and how there was a very good case that English needed a gender-indeterminant pronoun for routine use where you did not know (or care) what the gender of a person who, say, was subject to a contract, was.
Even though there was a precisionist case for it, people interested in language reform thought it was a complete non-starter and instead focused on other sorts of reforms.
Then 10 years ago thoughtless people who thought it was OK to mislabel people with terms like "latinx" and "cisgender" suddenly thought they could engineer language (which we share) without anyone's consent and in a culture of bad faith of course you get some jackass like Musk say his pronouns are "prosecute/Fauci" because it is all in bad faith.
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