walt posted on Tue, 03 Aug 2010 16:43:04 -0700 as excerpted: > On 08/03/2010 02:31 AM, Duncan wrote: > >> K Haley's the most obvious candidate given his community repo... > > Heh, interesting how perceptions differ in cyberspace. Ordinarily I > wouldn't even mention this, but I've had a few glasses of wine and my > good judgement is obviously impaired. > > AFAICR, K. has never given us a gender clue
Well, as regulars surely know by now, the list doesn't always stay on topic. Of course, it might be different and we'd need to be a bit more strict with it if pan was under fast-paced development (like the year-plus it was getting a release every week or two), but given the pace of things lately, a bit of diversion now and then keeps the locals (of which I'm definitely one) entertained, I guess! Anyway, while I'm aware of the "singular they" pronoun when gender isn't known, just as languages such as Spanish have gendered nouns (like say table, house, door, or bus) that don't really have anything to do with gender per say, and AFAIK generally uses the masculine/-o form as opposed to the feminine/-a form for individuals or groups of people where the gender is unknown or mixed, English has (at least regionally, and I think in general) traditionally used gendered pronouns with similar rules: masculine when referring to individuals or groups of people of unknown or mixed gender, and feminine when anthropomorphizing inanimate objects. For instance, hurricanes were traditionally christened with female names, tho male names are often used now, and boats, cars, etc, are more often referred to as "her" than "him", illustrating the female human- characterizing of inanimate objects, and correspondingly from the human reference side, "mankind" and "humankind" are general synonyms, while "womankind" refers to human females specifically. So that's simply what I was doing here. "He" is used in the gender- unspecified individual human being sense, not in the gender specified masculine human being sense. That said, I suppose partly because the FLOSS coding community is comparatively devoid of female presence, I do tend to assume male unless there's reason to believe otherwise. Looking at the whole thing from a different angle, nursing used to be a male dominated profession in which women weren't accepted, and women who went into it were considered strange, at minimum (gays/lesbians weren't accepted at all in those days, and a female nurse's sexuality was suspect). How that changed, tho well before me, as at least since I've been around, the profession has been so overwhelmingly female that "male nurse" is often used when one is specifically referring to a guy, to prevent the otherwise female assumption. Could/will that some day happen to computer coding? I don't know. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
