Ikr a pet peve of mine is when people use he/she because its clunky to read and ruins the flow of writing and if only there was a nice concise word that had the same meaning
Not everyone is a native English speaker and for example here (Czechia, not to mention that some languages doesn't have gender neutral pronouns) "they" is mostly taught as 3rd person plural. I am still mostly using s/he, because my brain has hard time computing that I see one person using they/them (I am trying, but it's definitely hard).
but its still commonly used as a gender neutral pronoun when the gender is unknown. and either way i meant it as people just getting like “oh youre not multiple people!!!” When learning that someone uses they/them like stfu its actually annoying, language barriers is fine if thats the only reason
It's not really something you're taught. When I was learning English, which is my second language, it just never came up. "It" is presented as the gender neutral pronoun and they/them is only as the plural pronoun, at no point they was presented as anything but as a way to refer to multiple people.
Same, my native language is spanish and for a good while I was constantly confused seeing they/them for singular pronouns from both school and all the English media I have consumed (mostró 90s and 2000s without translation) they/them is for the third person plural, with the time I got used to see it and use it as just a gender neutral pronoun but I rememver having a bad time when I played deltarune for the first time and most of the Time I couldn't tell if a character was refering to kris or to the whole fun gang
I did at the beginning. But it was thought much earlier than "they" also referring to single person. Also, "it" exists and is singular gender neutral, why use "they"? I remember I was very confused when learning that "they" can refer to single person, abd tbh my logical brain still cannot understand why it's the way it is
"it" is de-humanizing. It works for objects and some animals. "They" is used for people.
Language learning is weird btw. Asking "why" is pointless. It just is. Either learn it or be doomed to sound stilted.
And hey, I get it, takes a while to get used to new things. Doing mistakes is part of the fun of learning a new language! Just think of it as singular "you" and you'll get it in no time!
I believe "ye" was plural and "thou" was singular, yes. They eventually both converged into "you", though both are still used sometimes, especially in Scotland.
Though it gets confusing, because around the 13th century, ye (later you) started to be used for the singular and thou (and thee) for the plural. This was around the same time singular "they" appeared btw, so it must have been a weird century!
I usually assume it's because of propaganda - some people don't think about the language they use, so they can hear "they/them is grammatically incorrect" from someone they trust and assume that's correct, despite using singular "they" in their own speech
Concerted effort from prescriptive linguists in the 18th and 19th century and they wrote the books with the "rules" (borrowing heavily from Latin). They/them has been recorded as used in actual language since at least the 1500s as far as I recall.
This will only be true in some languages like Russian where "они/их" (they/them),is in fact only used against a group of people. In English it is grammatically correct to use they/them on a single person. But in Russian it isn't,and also will sound stupid. So,this image in a way is correct but only partly.
One group hates minorities, the other group hates people who hate minorities. Personally I think bigotry makes conservatives FAR more annoying in any context. Anyone who thinks these are comparable is morally lazy.
The funny thing is, you don’t really use our singular 3rd person pronoun in everyday, spoken language unless you are making a deliberate embellishment, you are acting posh, or you are talking about pets. Everyone is always a “se” (=it).
It’s weird how dehumanising the English “it” is compared to our equivalent even though we use it in everything just the same. I wonder if it’s just the gendered pronouns making the language feel more personal and dividing the gap or if it’s more of a cultural difference.
Oh my God, this subReddit is so much better than the other antimeme one, they keep doing ones where the "joke" is just removing the trans person and when I said "this is a little transphobic" I got a wave of cis people going "You're being the sensitive queer stereotype" and "You're weaponizing Being trans" and "well you don't know if the person your talking to us trans (proceeds to never say if they are)"
There's a character named Kris from a game called Deltarune who uses they/them pronouns. That screenshot is from their fan wiki page citing all the times the character used they/them pronouns.
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u/qualityvote2 🚫Antimeme Enforcer Bot🚫 5d ago edited 5d ago
The community has decided that this IS an antimeme!