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Conchita is not a "she"

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Reply 60
Avatar for Ronove
Ronove
18
Original post by ManifoldManifest
I mean, so I'm a massive great linguistic prescriptivist. And yet somehow I manage to call people the pronouns they ask for without language devolving into an incoherent word salad. Maybe you're just easily confused?

Edit: Can we have a protocol for establishing new words? Is "selfie" a word? At what point do we accept new words as words? Are the words Shakespeare made up real words yet? Should we still be speaking Chaucerian English, to be safe? Did the great vowel shift ever really happen?

This tickled me. I wonder how manchesterunited15 pronounces the word 'knight'.
Original post by ManifoldManifest
I mean, so I'm a massive great linguistic prescriptivist. And yet somehow I manage to call people the pronouns they ask for without language devolving into an incoherent word salad. Maybe you're just easily confused?

Edit: Can we have a protocol for establishing new words? Is "selfie" a word? At what point do we accept new words as words? Are the words Shakespeare made up real words yet? Should we still be speaking Chaucerian English, to be safe? Did the great vowel shift ever really happen?


I obviously meant if we start doing it for everything: if we just call things what we feel like.

Selfie is different to these new pronouns, as it's describing a new thing that didn't previously have a word. A new pronoun is not, we already have a word for it, that word being he or she.
Reply 62
Avatar for Ronove
Ronove
18
Original post by manchesterunited15
I obviously meant if we start doing it for everything: if we just call things what we feel like.

Selfie is different to these new pronouns, as it's describing a new thing that didn't previously have a word. A new pronoun is not, we already have a word for it, that word being he or she.

If xe meant something already adequately covered by either 'he' or 'she', it wouldn't have been coined.
Original post by Ronove
If xe meant something already adequately covered by either 'he' or 'she', it wouldn't have been coined.


He or she covers everything. Penis = he, vagina = she. I guess there's hermaphrodites too, but they tend to get surgery to become he or she.
Reply 64
Avatar for Ronove
Ronove
18
Original post by manchesterunited15
He or she covers everything. Penis = he, vagina = she. I guess there's hermaphrodites too, but they tend to get surgery to become he or she.

Do you seriously have to be told that he/she refers more to gender than sex these days? Again?
Original post by Ronove
Do you seriously have to be told that he/she refers more to gender than sex these days? Again?


Do you seriously have to be shown the definition of gender? Again?
He/she can call herself whatever he/she likes and I would probably humour her/his fantasies, but it's quite obvious that the person is definitely a male. When it comes to the crunch, everyone knows that it's not possible to switch gender.
Original post by manchesterunited15
Do you seriously have to be shown the definition of gender? Again?


"the state of being male or female (typically used with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones)."

Seems pretty clear in that parenthetical bit. Maybe you're thinking of sex? These are importantly different.
Original post by Zürich
He/she can call herself whatever he/she likes and I would probably humour her/his fantasies, but it's quite obvious that the person is definitely a male. When it comes to the crunch, everyone knows that it's not possible to switch gender.


Hence why I would use the male pronoun
Original post by ManifoldManifest
"the state of being male or female (typically used with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones)."

Seems pretty clear in that parenthetical bit. Maybe you're thinking of sex? These are importantly different.


"The members of one or other sex"
Original post by manchesterunited15
Hence why I would use the male pronoun


No skin of my nose what pronoun I use tbf. But I think people should be free to refer to him as a 'he' without fear of a PC backlash. In this day and age, you'd probably get the sack for stating a fact....
Original post by Zürich
No skin of my nose what pronoun I use tbf. But I think people should be free to refer to him as a 'he' without fear of a PC backlash. In this day and age, you'd probably get the sack for stating a fact....


I just think we should use the correct terms to refer to things. Seems logical really.
Enough with these discussions. He or she, who cares as long as the place is well deserved? What does it matter?


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Original post by manchesterunited15
I just think we should use the correct terms to refer to things. Seems logical really.


Ideally yes, but anyone who dresses up as a drag queen probably has some psychological issues and it's probably better to humour them to an extent.

What is wrong is for anyone to insist upon being called the wrong pronoun, but lots do that. Not sure but I can imagine it being some kind of 'hate crime' :rolleyes:
Original post by euphorie
Enough with these discussions. He or she, who cares as long as the place is well deserved? What does it matter?


Posted from TSR Mobile


I didn't actually watch the program, but a lot of people have been saying they think he only won because countries were trying to show how accepting etc they are. So maybe not well deserved.
Original post by manchesterunited15
"The members of one or other sex"


Well alright, if you want to use a different definition to the generally accepted one I suppose we can... wait, hold on, isn't that exactly what you're objecting to?

Gender, in pretty much all serious modern usage, is importantly and definitionally different from physical sex.
Original post by ManifoldManifest
Well alright, if you want to use a different definition to the generally accepted one I suppose we can... wait, hold on, isn't that exactly what you're objecting to?

Gender, in pretty much all serious modern usage, is importantly and definitionally different from physical sex.


It's a definition from the Oxford English Dictionary lol.
Original post by manchesterunited15
It's a definition from the Oxford English Dictionary lol.


Well if we're going to cite the OED let's go with 3. b (1 and 2 being irrelevant to the topic at hand): "The state of being male or female as expressed by social or cultural distinctions and differences, rather than biological ones;"

In fact, I'm looking at the OED right now and can't see the phrase "the members of one or other sex" at all.

Oh, they have usage notes, going right back to 1945: "Amer. Jrnl. Psychol. 58 228 In the grade-school years, too, gender (which is the socialized obverse of sex) is a fixed line of demarkation, the qualifying terms being ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’."

Hmm, seems to be implying a distinction between sex and gender right there, 70 years ago. So not a particularly new definition.
Original post by manchesterunited15
You can't just switch around from 'he' to 'she'.

Discuss.


If a male actor put on a female voice and voiced-over a CGI female character in an animated film, would you refer to that character as a "he"?
Original post by Zürich
No skin of my nose what pronoun I use tbf. But I think people should be free to refer to him as a 'he' without fear of a PC backlash. In this day and age, you'd probably get the sack for stating a fact....


There would be no "PC backlash", the only "backlash" going on here is people who insist on referring to the persona as a "he" out of some sort of protest when it affects them in no way to just say "she".

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