Comment by abustamam
12 hours ago
Maybe I'm just lucky but I have a few gen Z coworkers and they are probably more often than not the voice of reason in our org (start up with 8 engineers). I think if an employee can't handle simple constructive criticism or clarifications maybe they should not be employed.
I did used to work for a consulting firm about a decade ago, and I was leading a staff augmentation project with another company and I was once chastised for saying "hey guys" in a chat because there were women in the group. I was encouraged to use "y'all" but not wanting to sound like I was from the south, I just used "peeps" which was somehow okay.
I'm all for inclusive language but I thought that was a bridge too far.
A coworker was asked in a meeting how he was holding up after pulling an epic two day sprint to deliver a project that saved our butts. He replied “I felt like jumping out of a window.”
Someone reported him for not warning the room about suicidal ideation before saying it and not considering that it might be triggering. He was actually reprimanded.
Unfortunately typical of the place. I left soon after.
That's wild! I wonder how far I could get at a place like that by saying random things trigger me, like "don't call it a sprint because I once tripped and broke a tooth while sprinting" or something like that. Make an entire organization change their jargon and use fun words like "this is our two week adventure!"
I once told someone that they shouldn't use 'flesh out an idea' because it's offensive to skeletons.
That may be the game that others are playing. I always wonder how much of this is other countries paying agents to spoil the productivity of the West, as a retaliation for unmerited wars we do to them.
If that was how they treated top performers, I'd hope you had quite a bit of company on the way out.
I think this is... well, hilarious is the wrong word. How does that protect anyone that's suicidal? It's teaching everyone that you will be punished for expressing it.
> How does that protect anyone that's suicidal?
It doesn't, this kind of language policing is all about control and power.
A friend of mine worked as consultant with a big bank in London. They would get weekly emails about what kind of "newspeak" is allowed or not.
They seriously banned terms such as an "all hands meeting".
Woke 1 was absolutely crazy.
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Reminds me of that one time my partner mentioned "Latino" in a meeting, referring to people from Central and South America in broad terms (this was a marketing meeting, where customers are naturally grouped together along various dimensions).
She was told to not use "Latino"; but to use "LatinX" instead. What hurt more was the implication that she was being insensitive.
When I learned of it, I asked my Mexican friends which one they preferred. None of them had heard of "LatinX" and were as confused as I was.
“Latinx” is weird because it seems to have arisen from a set of privileged English speakers deciding that poor downtrodden Latinas were being hurt by a word they never complained about and pushing this as the “appropriate” word. It’s so clearly not born of the Latino community because that’s not the construction they would use.
I remember reading about some similar thing with French and the French president’s wife responding that the language was beautiful the way it was and they don’t need outsiders telling them how to gender (or not) their words.
Gives vibes of saying “unhoused” instead of homeless.
I feel like the affluent just love to invent new words to show the “others” that aren’t using it how backwards they are, and how the affluent are truly enlightened.
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The sillyness of LatinX is that there isn't even an "Ecks" sound in Spanish.
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I think the Latino community who cares about such things prefers "latine".
LatinX is awful. An AIM screen name from 1998.
Here in Spain both the 'x' and '@' versions are really common in written language. The 'e' version I've not seen. But they're not really spoken because the X and @ versions are weird to pronounce. Replacing the o and a with an e makes more sense but it hasn't really seemed to have reached here.
And no it's not just privileged white people. My Spanish teacher was a Colombiana and she always pointed out the innate patriarchal traits of the Spanish language while rolling her eyes.
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> it seems to have arisen from a set of privileged English speakers
I'd recommend getting out a bit more or reading a bit more:
> According to Google Trends, it was first seen online in 2004,[7][21][22] and first appeared in academic literature around 2013 "in a Puerto Rican psychological periodical to challenge the gender binaries encoded in the Spanish language."[20][23] Contrarily, it has been claimed that usage of the term "started in online chat rooms and listservs in the 1990s" and that its first appearance in academic literature was in the Fall 2004 volume of the journal Feministas Unidas.[24][25] In the rest of the United States, it was first used in activist and LGBT circles as a way to expand on earlier attempts at gender-inclusive forms of the grammatically masculine Latino, such as Latino/a and Latin@.[21] A similar use of 'x' in the term Mx. may have been an influence or model for the development of Latinx.[10]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinx
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Latinx appears to be on the way out now as well, to be replaced by Latine, for exactly the situation you described. "Latinx" didn't come out of the broader community of native speakers, and was seemingly rejected due to that fact.
… I wish they picked a better word, because I actually misread that as Latrine… definitely not going to be referring to anybody with _that_ at least.
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Both were presumably invented by insufferable white people.
9/10 Latinos would roll their eyes and get back to doing actual work, they don't have time to be offended.
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I was born in Peru and I absolutely abhor the word "LatinX". I assume people meant well, but ironically, it exhibits the "we Americans known better than you" attitude that liberals usually avoid.
No one has been saying LatinX for years. Why the anti-lib propaganda from 2022? Are y'all really that desperate to connect with folks?
It it still a thing in many California based tech companies.
Was I wrong in assuming that "Latinx" was only intended for written language? Because it's not pronounceable in any way that makes sense.
I pronounce it "la-tinks" if forced to read it aloud. Always gets some side-eye from coworkers you probably already find obnoxious.
It's all a performance to them anyway, and I'm not playing the game.
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> I think if an employee can't handle simple constructive criticism or clarifications maybe they should not be employed.
and then
> I was encouraged to use "y'all" [..] I thought that was a bridge too far.
I wonder if there might be a small bias on your part. The criticism you deem constructive everyone shall endure, but the other criticism you deem a bridge too far you yourself shall not endure.
The original story about not handling criticism well was someone crying after a kind question, not merely saying something was a bridge too far. (FWIW if I saw someone cry once, I would consider it might be a one-off due to stress at home etc, not necessarily a constant personality trait I'll have to deal with regularly.)
There’s a difference between feedback regarding your work and language policing something like “you guys” which some people have just suddenly decided is offensive as of 2016 or so because I guess we’ve already solved the rest of sexism.
This is/was absolutely a thing and I saw it happen to others and switched to y’all, I got called out for using “dude” and come on dude, dude is extremely gender neutral in this sense.
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No one decided it was offensive. Show me anyone saying they're offended by the use of "guys" as a gender neutral term.
People get lumped into "guys" and feel excluded. That's such a different bar than feeling offended.
It's ok for you to say, "I'm sorry my language makes you feel excluded, but I'm not going to change" and it's ok for someone to think less of you as a result.
Why does everyone jump to the idea that people who want more inclusive language are offended? Or that the critique being offered here is that the language is offensive?
(Granted, sometimes that is the critique. Plenty of casual racism or ableism is offensive. But that's not the case with "guys".)
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There's probably bias on my part. But I didn't cry about the criticism as the person I was replying to mentioned. Technically I abided by the criticism. I didn't agree, but I liked having the social capital with my employer more than I cared about how I felt about the policing. It's all just words in the end, I just thought it was nitpicky.
Because he was saying “hey guys “ naturally without thinking twice.
Now you make him think twice about what he’s saying, of course he’s going to nitpick everything.
The start of the "electric company" started with I think Rita Moreno shouting "Hey you guys..."
anyway I have always considered Hey guys as gender neutral.
Merriam Webster seems to agree by listing this as a secondary meaning.
used in plural to refer to the members of a group regardless of sex saw her and the rest of the guys.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/guy
You appear to be German so I will assume you lack the cultural context to understand why these two things are not comparable. Asking someone born outside of the deep south to refer to a group of people as “y’all” is so absurd my immediate assumption would be that my coworker was playing a joke on me.
I'm very much not from anywhere resembling the American south, and "you all" is very much a part of my lexicon.
The difference being that telling someone they are not allowed to use "guys" is not a valid criticism. It's just someone being a bully and trying to language-police others.
Somehow you missed: Not all critiques are equally valid or valid at all.
and then
Somehow you missed: They did deal with it. The one they criticized did not.
Both of these issues come because our ancestors messed up changing the language.
Centuries ago, "thou" was singular second person and "you" was plural second person.
"Thou" got abandoned and "you" lost its original meaning to replace "thou" as the new singular second person.
"You guys" or "y'all" are simply attempts to re-introduce a needed pronoun.
IIRC "you" was also the formal second person pronoun (like usted in Spanish or vous in French).
I think it's all just normal evolution of language. I actually think it's kinda neat how different English-speaking subcultures found different ways to reintroduce the pronoun.
So we get to fight sexism AND bring back cool anachronistic language? I'm in.
Australia has 'yous' for plural you. Yous is used exactly how you might think it'd be used.
Beware! Y’all doesn’t necessarily include everyone:
> All y'all is used in the Southern United States when a speaker wishes to include everyone being addressed. Y'all may refer to an indefinite set of members of a group, but all y'all definitively includes everyone in the group.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/all_y%27all
I dunno, as someone who’s lived their entire life in the southern US this sounds really pedantic. At best.
Also, is it just me or does that Wikipedia entry have zero citations? I thought Wikipedia was allergic to citation-free claims..
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> I'm all for inclusive language but I thought that was a bridge too far.
Because you haven’t been living on “the other side” for a whole life. Try living decades in environments where you’re constantly devalued in little ways, and you too might grow to become resentful.
Now, maybe you were chastised, or maybe you were just asked politely and interpreted it as a reprimand. I wasn’t there, I can’t say, all I have is your side. But let’s say the person did chastise you. They could probably have been more polite about it, but how many times have they been polite before with no results? That’s maybe not your fault, but you did unwillingly contribute to that person’s exasperation that day.
All I’m saying is let’s have a little empathy towards others, even when they don’t have it towards us, because we all have days when we’re our best and days when we aren’t, and we don’t know what the other person is going through.
I go for “yinz” then, and tell them not to discriminate against my Pittsburgh area heritage
Yinz goin dahn tahn for the Stillers game? I need a ride, car needs fixed.
Odd, the dictionary definition (here: webster's) is literally:
> guy: (...) person —used in plural to refer to the members of a group regardless of sex
Yeah, tell that to my manager at the time!
If we want to trace back the etymology of the term "guy" we would unearth some interesting facts. The most infamous "Guy" of the 17th century is Guy Fawkes, would-be Catholic terrorist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes
Guy Fawkes is most notorious in the UK today as the progenitor of Guy Fawkes Night, where children solicit "a penny for the Guy?" and the funds raised ostensibly go to construct and burn a large straw effigy of Guy, in order to celebrate his defeat and the survival of the Parliament. He was executed, not by burning but by hanging, but nevertheless Guy Fawkes is the original Burning Man.
Guy Fawkes Night was imported to the United States during our independence, and it became Pope Night, a night of mayhem and anti-Catholic vandalism and hooliganism. George Washington once told his military troops to knock it off with the Pope Night shenanigans, because it was alienating Canadians.
So the term "guy" became genericized, beginning in Australia it seems, to refer to a grubby lower-class Catholic boy. After a few centuries of circulating in this way, it lost most of its derogatory connotation and became a generic way to refer to men or boys, and by extension, girls and women.
I don't take offense at being called "guy", nor would I if I were female, and especially because today in the USA, it is so generic and inoffensive. Nobody recalls its sordid roots, even if Pope Night is making a resurgence around here.
> So the term "guy" became genericized, beginning in Australia it seems, to refer to a grubby lower-class Catholic boy.
I'm sceptical of this alleged Australian connection. As far as I'm aware, the term started in England, spread to the US, and it is in the US that its usage really took off. In Australia, "guy"/"guys" as a term for a male or gender-neutral person was imported from the US in the second half of the 20th century.
Just holler
Can you use "hey everyone" or does that offend schizophrenics?
The Gen Z and Alphas will save us. As a late Gen X, most of our cohorts were bogged down eating for boomers to die and are lost causes in big companies.